As If Wall Posting and Poking Wasn’t Enough, Soon You’ll Be Able To Chat With Your Facebook Friends Real-Time

Facebook, the $15 billion social network is supposedly tinkering around with an instant messaging service within their platform.  If this isn’t a challenge to Google and AOL, I don’t know what is.  Google’s social network, Orkut has a feature to connect Google Talk within the social network as well.  And now that AOL owns Bebo, it won’t be long until AIM is integrated into that social network as well.

TechCrunch also pointed out that this will not be good for the instant messaging applications built around Facebook such as Social.IM.  Facebook already has a wall, a message system, a poking system, and thousands of applications to probe a reaction from your friends.  Will an instant messaging system make a huge impact?  I doubt it.

Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, and Google Talk are the oligopoly players in the messaging space.  Taking these players on is definitely a David and Goliath situation.  But if there’s anything I learned while writing about Web 2.0 companies is not to underestimate the underdog.  Perhaps Facebook has a steady slingshot.

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2. AOL Acquires The Relegence Corporation, A Real-Time Financial Services News Engine
3. Facebook Asking Users To Be Translators
4. AOL buys Bebo for $850 million in cash
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