Instant messengers such as ICQ and MSN Messenger used to be a great way to keep in touch with old friends that we no longer see very often but that has all changed today because everyone is on Facebook. As you may have already know, Facebook has a chat feature where it allows you to chat with your friends in real time. One good useful feature found on the Facebook chat is you can go offline so that no one will bother you while you are still logged on to Facebook and able to go through your friend’s profile. If you chat very often in Facebook but don’t want to keep your Facebook account logged in in your web browser, then the official Facebook Messenger for Windows will be very useful to you.
Facebook has finally released an official version of Messenger for Windows operating system that allows Facebook users to chat with each other, see the latest updates from your friends in ticker and get quick notifications about what’s going on right from your desktop without logging in from the web browser.
After logging in to Facebook Messenger, your friends will be loaded and all you need to do is double click on their names to bring up a chat window. The ticker simply provides a very simple information on the updates but you cannot view them. Clicking on any of the updates at the ticker will launch your default web browser to view it from there. I would say that there is an advantage to this because nobody will be able to access your Facebook profile and mess with it even if they had physical access to your computer.
The Facebook Messenger seems to be like a web messenger because everything is pulled from the Facebook website which would cause a bit of delay in loading your contacts, unlike the Windows Live Messenger or Google Talk where they are true desktop based instant messaging software that everything is loaded instantly. Other than that, Facebook Messenger is a very simple application solely for chatting and it lacks of many configuration options such as the inability to disable Facebook Messenger from auto startup, saving the Facebook login credentials and auto login. The only thing you can do is enable/disable chat sounds and dock to the right of your screen.
Currently the Facebook Messenger only run on Windows 7 and they are working on a new version that will support Windows Vista. As for Windows XP, the Facebook Messenger developers do not support it. Video calls is also not yet supported.
Official Desktop Facebook Messenger for Windows is a post from: Raymond.CC Blog