Facebook is testing a new one-to-one chat feature which will add much demanded instant messaging support.

Considering slowness of emails and hard-to find walls on cluttered facebook profile pages, this move will really improve communication with online facebook friends.

Following is a screenshot of this upcoming feature, courtesy CNN.

Yep, this looks more like Gmail chat feature with other notable similarities. It will also have option to pop-out chat into a separate window and a partial history feature where you can see and clear recent conversations. But Gmail being an email service, reside in a single window, while in facebook multiple profiles and other apps’ pages remain open in multiple windows at the same time. So it will be interesting to watch how this feature will be integrated?

One more thing, the same chat window will be used for other notifications like stories from news feeds, much like Orkuts scrap alerts feature.

Although in first release, there will not be any support for other instant messenger networks, Michael Arrington is hopeful about third parties figuring out a way to hack into the service as they’ve done with Yahoo, MSN and AIM in the past.

[via Elizabeth Landau, CNN & Michael Arrington, TechCrunch]

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