Facebook Chat - Not too bad

When it was first introduced, I was wondering why in the world Facebook would incorporate a chat feature. Over the past 2 years, Facebook has gone from light and fun to heavy and repetitive. By adding yet another 'application'/functionality, they were just bogging things down even further.

I didn't care to use it at first, but now I'm using it quite a bit. The main reason is that when I see a friend online, it find it better to just send a chat message and get a live response - most of the time.

I have over 250 friends in my list, and rarely have I parsed through the list trying to get in touch with people... but if they are online, it's easy to notice that and fire off a message.

One thing I don't like is how you can only view one chat message window at a time. They should make the windows minimizable, but at the same time, you should have the option of keeping them all open - Gmail (chat) has done that well.

How have you found this feature? Useful or just another annoyance?