GIZMODO - How to Fix Facebook's New Broken Chat System (YES!)

How to Fix Facebook’s New Broken Chat System (YES!)

Jesus Diaz — Gizmodo reader Tal Ater agreed that Facebook's new chat system is a clusterzuck of confusion, so he created a little program to fix it! It will take off the list anyone who's offline. Here's how to do it:

• Go to his download page.
• If you use Windows, download the program on top. After running it, your Facebook chat will forever only show the people who are online (green icon) or recently online (with the away icon).
• If you use Mac or Linux, add the bookmarklet "Fix Chat" to your browser bookmarks bar. You will need to click on the bookmarket in every new Facebook window (I keep mine open most of the time, so this is ok).

That's it. It works great but, as always, run this software at your own risk.

Tal says that he's working on a version that would fix the Facebook chat permanently on Mac and Linux machines. And again, remember that there are still plenty of reasons for quitting Facebook and going to Google+.

Hi Jesus,

How about that "Show only online friends" button you asked for?

I read your article on why facebook chat is screwed up, and decided to pull up my sleeves and dig into the facebook source code to see if that would be possible.

It turns out, all it took was changing one line of code, and no more letting facebook decide for us who we want to talk to.

I just published the code as open source on GitHub.

And for the less geeky crowd, I even created a little executable that you can download and run to fix the facebook chat once and for all.

You can read more about it and try it yourself on my site.

I'd be happy to answer any questions, and hopefully see it covered on Gizmodo.

Either way, thanks for the idea

via gizmodo.com