We already showed you how Messenger is a great social media aggregator so you know it brings everything together for you to make life easier.  What if you don’t have lots of people to talk to on messenger wouldn’t it be great to be able to save time and connect with your Facebook friends in a handy single chat window.  Well now you can.

Facebook chat is now integrated with Messenger and it’s done in slick and trustworthy way.

The first thing you see if you already have it installed and the links setup is this following box appear at the top of the social stream.  There’s no automatic assumption made that you want to chat with your Facebook friends, some apps might do that but Messenger is built to keep your trust.  If you don’t already have FB integrated you can do the same thing through Tools > Settings… hit Alt first.

The next thing you get is choice over what you want to share with Facebook, one obviously being chat.

Hit Connect with Facebook provide your logon deets and your golden!  Now in your Messenger window you’ll start to see the online status of your Friends when they’re on Facebook or using any other application that enables Facebook chat.

I’m finding I’m actually using Facebook chat where I didn’t use it before and there are always more people online for me to talk to, oh yeah and I get alerted when new people are online through a little slice of toast popping up in the bottom right of my screen that tells me the difference between my messenger and my Facebook friends…some are both obviously and if they’re connected to both at the same time Messenger takes the load because it’s a richer experience.

You can get the loveable refreshed beta here.

This was originally posted to Underbelly where we talk about cool webby stuff and things like that.