Facebook's Relevance-Filtered Chat Buddy List, or, Why Users Don't Know Who's Online

Since the Skype Video Calling and Chat redesign launch a month ago, you may have noticed something missing from your Facebook home page. The Facebook Chat buddy list now only shows you the online status of a subset of your closest or most recently interacted with friends, around 20 on a screen of average size and resolution. You can only determine if the rest of your friends are available to Chat by searching for them one by one.

The redesign makes a bad tradeoff.

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