Facebook has been the source of a lot of angst among people just wanting to get work done. Who needs to do a company report when you can poke your friends and tell them what you really think of them in their honesty boxes? Luckily, the people at Facebook have added the ability to chat with your friends on the site, which is sure to alleviate a lot of the productivity problems people claim to be having. Just kidding, this thing is probably going to get your fired.

When the chat feature first launched one of the first things my less tech-savvy friends expressed was that a lot more time was going to be wasted on the site. While I see their point I can still see the use of it. For one thing, it means you can now chat with the people you’ve added on Facebook but aren’t quite comfortable with yet to give them your actual IM accounts. C’mon, you know you have those friends!

Since everyone on your friend list are supposed to be your friends there isn’t any way to block certain people just yet, at least I didn’t find any way. You can a “go offline” but all it does is disable your ability to chat with anyone, so if you wanted to chat with some people and not with others you’re out of luck for now.

The chat can be popped out which is nice, meaning you can have the chat without actually being on the site itself though there aren’t any sounds or distinctive visual cues to tell you there is a new message when the window is minimized. Annoying for me when I want to get people’s messages, but a blessing for those who want to check for messages on their own time. Personally it just means I’ll be checking for a new message every 5 seconds, and no, I’m not nearly as popular to warrant such actions.

Facebook, Facebook Chat, Twitter, Pownce, Google Reader, Socialthing, Friendfeed, UNEASYsilence. I think the internet officially hates me. When will I ever get time to go outside?