Facebook Introduces Stealth Mode, Friend Lists in Chat

We have had an invisible mode in Yahoo Messenger, Live Messenger and Google Talk (the web edition) since long and seems like Facebook wants to join this bandwagon. Yesterday, Facebook pushed some updates to its chat system, commonly called FBChat. A highly demanded feature, people can now go stealth and hide their online status from some friends, while staying online for the others.

People can categorize their contacts into different lists, like family, colleagues etc and set the availability setting for each list. Once you create a list, you can either drag and drop contacts into it or if they are offline at that time, you can manually click the edit link and add users one by one.

When you appear offline for a particular list, the contacts in that list can’t see your online status and neither can you see if they are online or not. The stealth mode can’t be applied to particular users but you’ll have to create a list of contacts for appearing offline to them.

There’s not much of a difference apart from this. If you are looking for the ‘Go offline’ link, that is now placed under the ‘Options’ tab built right inside the Chat window this time.

With more than 200 million people actively using Facebook across the world, it seems to be making the right moves to attract more people towards it. What started as a college community site is now a worldwide name. What do you think of this feature? Like it? Hate it? Tell us in the comments!

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