Last week, Facebook decided to tweak the site again, this time altering the chat sidebar to show only the people users primarily interact with, whether they’re available to chat or not. That’s mildly annoying to me, but becomes a major issue for people with hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends. Fortunately for us, Israeli web dev Tal Alter, who was the first to discover Facebook’s video chat plans with Skype last year, has already figured out a fix!
There are three versions. The first is for the Brainiacs in the room. You just need to paste the code in your browser console. This one is a bit beyond me, so I’ll leave it at that.
The second version is a browser extension that downloads as an executable file directly from GitHub. As always, use executables at your own risk. AVG really didn’t like this one and tried to quarantine the whole thing. After I convinced AVG it was okay, the extension worked perfectly. No more offline friends in my chat sidebar. (This version has been reported to work in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer.)
Thirdly, less tech-savvy people might prefer this bookmarklet that you can drag to your bookmark toolbar. You have to click it every time you open a new Facebook tab or window, but it’s less invasive than the executable and requires less browser knowledge than the first. It also works like a charm.
Of course, the best solution would be for Facebook to undo this change. Until they do, if they do, this fix is a welcome option. Thanks, Tal!
Yeah, the selective “These are the folks you interact with most, so you can’t possibly want to chat with the others on your friends list” thing is really irritating. I have some friends that I don’t interact with often, but whom I might pin…g if they are online when I am. But since I can’t see all of those any more, I can’t tell. PLUS – you cannot scroll down the sidebar they give you, so you have no way of knowing if others are online besides what they show you.
IRRITATING. Grr.