Facebook has developed a new chat room function code-named Host Chat

Facebook has confirmed that it has begun testing this feature. Compared to AOL's traditional chat rooms, the "Host Chat" feature allows Facebook users to meet friends and stay on the site longer. Although Facebook confirmed that it was testing the feature, it did not give more details, saying only that "a small number of users are sometimes involved in the test." "Because only a small percentage of users are involved in the test, the test range is small and sometimes only for a specific country, so unless the feature test goes smoothly and is rolled out on a larger scale, other users will not see this feature on their own Facebook."

Sources say the news comes as Facebook competes with its rivals in the area of chat applications. Rivals for Facebook's own cross-platform chat apps include SMS, Apple's imessage and Google's new Unified Messaging system hangouts. In addition, Facebook faces competition from independent international rivals such as WhatsApp, Japan's line and Snapchat.

Chat applications can attract a large number of users to participate, and through advertising and mapping sales, valuable user data for direct profit. For technology giants such as Apple, Google and Facebook, chat apps encourage users to use the platform more and push users to stay longer on other products.

Because of its relatively passive nature, chat rooms may be a powerful weapon in the field of chatting applications. With direct private communication, users often switch interfaces frequently in order to send or read messages, but users will stay in the chat room for a long time once they join the chat room. This is consistent with the strategy that Facebook is trying to attract users to stay on the site longer. Facebook users who enter the chat room may spend more time browsing news or friends, so they will see more ads.

How the Facebook chat room function is implemented

The source revealed details about the implementation of the chat room feature. However, this feature is also likely to be discarded without meeting the user. It is reported that the Facebook chat room features a great improvement in the interface, so if Facebook decides to launch this feature on a wider scale, then some details may change.

Facebook will create the "Host Chat" option in the Status Update column of the home page. The user currently has only two option buttons in this column where the update status and add Photos/video are visible. The Host Chat button will be the third option.

Click on the "Host Chat" button to start the chat room, the user can name it (name can reflect the theme of the chat room, such as discussing a topic, planning an event or study a project, etc.), and the choice of friends to join the chat room, which is somewhat similar to the existing group chat function. Users who enter the chat room see the chat window similar to the traditional one-to-one chat window on Facebook.

The special feature of "host Chat" is that all the friends of the chat room host can join the chat room without invitation, and the friends can see the message that the user is hosting a chat room in their news, and choose whether to join. This is similar to the chat function in the Facebook groups, as long as the users in the group can participate in the discussion. Using news features to extend and expand chat rooms is the habit of making the most of Facebook's ubiquity and its vast group of friends browsing News at any time.

However, the chat room host can set privacy restrictions, set which friends can join the chat room, and exclude those who do not want him to join the friends. In addition, this feature may also have an option to allow friends to join the chat room, so that the size of the chat room expanded rapidly, but this feature is not confirmed. Finding the best way to solve the privacy problems that may be caused by the chat room's friends ' interactions is probably one of the goals of the Facebook test.

A mid-sized team of Facebook employees, including some of the existing chat application teams, has been developing this feature. The early internal Facebook test for "Host Chat" features only text, no pictures and videos, and the feature may include emoticons, but it's not clear whether Facebook's likeable new message maps are allowed in chat rooms. The current test is limited to Web pages, but Facebook has always claimed to be a mobile company, meaning that the feature might also support a small screen, and that if the feature test responds well, it may eventually log on to mobile devices.

Enhance social function

Facebook chat rooms may compete with Google's hangouts, where there are many similarities. Users in the Friends circle selected by Google + are also free to join Hangouts. The most attractive place for hangouts is that there are up to 10 people to participate in video chats, and Hangouts offers many other advanced media sharing features. The advantage of the Facebook chat room is spontaneity and promotion. Facebook's dynamic involvement has generated more information flow than Google +, and thanks to this, more friends will be able to see their friends start a Facebook chat room they can join, compared to using hangout.

The pleasant, uninhibited atmosphere of the chat room helps Facebook attract and retain young users. Earlier, there were concerns that young users were turning to emerging social networks and communications platforms, such as Snapchat and Tumblr.

In addition, the chat room can also bring vitality to the Facebook social map. Because the chat room host's friends can join the chat room, therefore the people finally also can communicate with the friend's friend. Similar to the chat room in the late 90, you can send letters to people in the chat room and add them to your buddy list, and users can be friends with everyone in the chat room.

This may bring Facebook closer to the dominant "social discovery" areas such as tagged and badoo. However, this is not a complete stranger, strangers may have a trusted mutual friend, they build a bridge of friendship in the Facebook chat room. This further enhances the value of Facebook, not only to rebuild the offline social atlas site, but also to further expand the social scope of users.

There is no doubt that the privacy of this feature will be very complex and may end up being too complex for privacy settings to give up during testing. But as things stand, Facebook is able to build a truly online social interaction platform that can be tested. If the Facebook chat room succeeds, it will not only improve Facebook's user participation, but also make the social networking site a more exciting web destination and attract users to stay longer- It's also a recipe for a nine-year-old social networking site to keep growing.