Facebook has officially launched its new chat application for the members of the social network.

The new application is already seen by many to be a strong rival to the more established IM tools such as Yahoo! Chat and Facebook investor, Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger.

A chat bar at the foot of the browser shows which friends are online at any time. Users can communicate with their friends in real-time rather than through email messages or wall posts. Notifications will also be sent through this new application.

It can also be accessed from any Internet enabled computer as it does not require downloading any client software. Facebook Chat is being gradually rolled out across the social networking site’s 70 million or so users.

"Chat is by no means a new concept, as instant messaging systems have been around for over a decade", says Josh Wiseman, engineering lead at Facebook on the company’s blog.

"But just as other features on Facebook have allowed friends to communicate more efficiently than before, we hope Facebook Chat will make it easier to connect instantly."

Facebook Chat undoubtedly will be popular with users. However, according to Mickael Remond, CEO of ProcessOne, an instant messaging company, the lack of integration with other IM tools is a disappointment.

"At the moment Facebook Chat has only been released to a few testers, but once it goes live the chat facility will probably encourage greater use of Facebook and build a much stronger community feeling for users of the site," he said.

"However, by offering chat, Facebook will be further fragmenting the instant messaging space, which is already rather disjointed, and users are likely to become increasingly frustrated at the lack of interoperability between the various different public IM services. There is already pressure for IM services to be based on a standard protocol, as with email 10 years ago. This may encourage Facebook to adopt an open standards approach, such as adapting XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) in the same way that social networking sites like Twitter have done."