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I keep waiting for Facebook, or someone else, to announce "Face IM", an IM client that uses the social graph that I have already setup in Facebook to manage my IM life.

Another IM system???? Well, they wouldn't have to run their own service, but could play the meta-role a la Adium/Trillian and use the IM names that the users have already put in. This would all be hidden from the users though, they would just start chatting to their friends. At some point it may make sense to setup Jabber so users without IM settings can play too.

Just as Gmail changed the way I use my email system (now I am not anal about filters and directories....) Face IM could do something different with IM.

I currently have IM taking up part of my screen, on one of my virtual desktops. All that is shown there is a list of people. Who cares? Instead of showing that list, what if the application looked like Joe's iPhone application?

A nice clean interface to my event stream as well as my friends. I would probably use that over a tab in my browser. I would give up the view of a bunch of friends names, and instead have rich information as well as the spring board to IM.

Of course, just like Gmail, you could tie in the IM system to the Facebook Mail system too, and they could even get all Meebo-y if they wanted.

I am more interested in taking the social graph outside of Facebook.com. The platform is about more than the walled garden, and showing this via Face IM would be great.