Bebo Launches Chat

Posted by Nick O'Neill on August 23rd, 2008 6:23 PM

This weekend Bebo has released a chat feature for their site. The new feature resembles Facebook’s chat in that there is a chat display at the bottom of every page on the site. You can view a list which displays current friends that are online and then there is also separate windows for each instant message. The more messages you open, the more prompts that show up (as displayed in the image below).

Chat is rapidly becoming a standard feature across social platforms. I’ve been discussing chat an increasing amount as Meebo and Userplane continue to expand their offerings and social platforms continue to roll out new chat features. It’s great to see Bebo releasing their own version of chat as well. Chat naturally integrates into social networks so it’s not surprising to see Bebo release this.

I would guess that we’ll see other social networks currently without chat features begin to roll out a service over the coming months. Most social networks appear to be following Facebook’s lead when it comes to rolling out new features as they are now the largest social network worldwide. It will be interesting to see what creative twists we see on newly released chat platforms.

Thanks to Harel Shattenstein for the heads up!

Bebo Chat Screenshot

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