We’ve seen some version of this indicator all over the place for years, but the newest home for Facebook’s green dot indicator seems to be directly in the news feed. Appearing right next to the users’ name inside a news feed story, Facebook’s green dot lets users know that the person is online and ready for messaging. Here’s what it looks like:

We spotted this test on an account that has the new news feed, and were unable to find a similar icon inside the mobile news feed. I’ve reached out to Facebook for comment and will update when I hear back.

UPDATE: Facebook confirms that they are running a limited test to put “presence dots” in the news feed. For now, that test is only for desktop.

You may recognize that little green dot from Facebook’s chat sidebar on both desktop and mobile. There, the green dot for availability is accompanied by a mobile device icon that signifies that the user has Facebook for iOS or Android downloaded, so they have the ability to see messages on their phones.

Way back in 2011, Facebook added the chat indicator next to users’ names on their profiles (the old profiles, way before Timeline).

Apparently, Snapchat is processing more photos daily than Instagram. And not just more – nearly four times as many.

The figure was announced today by Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference put on by All Things D.

According to Spiegel, Snapchat is moving upwards of 150 million photos across the network every day. If you compare that to another popular photo-sharing service like Instagram, you find that Snapchat is moving a significantly more amount of total photos. Instagram currently boasts 40 million photos taken per day.

Of course, Instagram and Snapchat are very different services. Instagram is about long-lasting photos, ones that can be liked, commented upon, and browsed in a social networking frame. Snapchat, on the other hand, is a lot more focused on person-to-person communication.

If you’re unfamiliar with Snapchat, the premise is quite simple – but rather ingenious. Users can send short photos or videos to other users – self-deleting photos or videos being the most important aspect. Users can designate exactly how long they want the photo or video to stay viewable, after which time it will disappear. The app even notifies the sender if the recipient tried to make the communication more than ephemeral by taking a screenshot.

When it first launched, Snapchat defended itself against allegations that it was simply an app for sexting. On its face, it does appear like the perfect sort of app to send sexts without the fear of permanence. And believe me, I’m sure that there is plenty of that going on. But with 150 million photos taken daily, it’s clear that Snapchat is more a serious player and less of a niche sexting app.

Earlier this year, it became clear that Facebook saw Snapchat as a competitor when they released their “Poke” app. To say that the Poke app is heavily inspired by Snapchat is putting it the best way possible.

Oh, and speaking of Facebook, they say that they see “more than 300 million photos uploaded every day.” By that figure, Snapchat is seeing nearly half of what Facebook sees every day. Now that’s incredible.

The new design has blue and white chat bubbles, instead of the simple text that users currently see. According to AllFacebook, Facebook looks to be testing the new desktop chat for a small set of international users.

Here’s what it looks like:

Compare that to the current format:

Which format do you prefer?

Version 5.1 of Facebook for iOS brings multiple photo sharing and a bunch of chat-oriented updates.

Now, users can access their chat list in two new ways. First, there’s now a button on the top right of the app. Second, users can swipe to the left to pull over their chat list. So, swipe right for navigation menu, and swipe left for chat list. With this update, Facebook for iOS now mimics Facebook on desktop.

Once you’ve accessed the chat list, you can now edit the order of your friends to put your most-talked-to buddies at the top. Each friend also sports an online indicator that lets you know if they are currently available or tells you how long they’ve been active but idle (on mobile).

Finally, Facebook brings Facebook Gifts to iOS. It’s been available on Android for some time. The caveat here is that this is only for U.S. users and you must already be a part of the small Facebook Gifts test in order to have the functionality on mobile. Facebook is currently working on rolling Gifts out to more users.

Back in August, Facebook released a completely rebuilt app with version 5.0. The app abandoned HTML-5 and instead opted for Objective-C, looking to combat the criticism that the old app was clunky, slow, and unusable at times. Within a few weeks, the app’s star rating had jumped from 1.5 stars to 4 stars thanks to the redesign.

You can download the update on iTunes right now.

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New Facebook for iOS – now you can share multiple photos, swipe left to chat, and add friends to Favorites. https://t.co/Tk6ncyns

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The side-by-side view is one of the improvement that’s part of the newest update to Facebook messages. Now, your inbox will appear on the lef-hand side, and you actual message threads on the right. Everything on the same page – awesome.

Facebook has also added multiple photo functionality to messages, as well as emoticons.

Also coming along with this update: better search and navigation. You can now search by user name and keyword as well as utilize new keyboard commands.

And it’s smiling at you.

Click on it and you’ll see that Facebook has officially added emoticons to its official messaging options. As of now, there are 21 different offerings – 19 faces, a heart, and even the trademark Facebook “like.” Now, you can let your friends know that you approve of their last message in the official Facebook manner.

“You can now easily add smiley faces and other emoticons to a conversation when you’re chatting with your friends. Look for the icon in the bottom right corner of your chat window and emote away,” said Facebook in a tip.

Of course, users have been able to add emoticons, rage faces, and even faces of friends and famous people to Facebook chat with certain codes. But having a handy emoticon menu allows us all to embrace our inner tween.

As of now, the new emoticon menu only appears in Facebook chat (not within messages although the two are linked) and only on your desktop.

Every time someone talks in chat their name is pronounced and what they are talking about is put in voice. It also identifies when they exit a hangout.

Mansuour wrote in a Google+ post Wednesday night that he hacked the extension together in a few hours after meeting a blind war veteran in a Google+ Hangout: “I was writing on the chat on the left, and it was really difficult for him to read the text. I am really into accessibility, and I worked on it a lot in Chromium in the past, and I really wanted to help him. So I told Tim, ‘what if the chat spoke to you?’ Tim said, ‘that would be awesome’. When I saw the big smile on his face, I had to do it!

The Accessible Hangouts extension is an open source project. Mansour hopes that the extension will become part of Hangouts in the near future but it must be download for now.

Twitter users applaud Mansour’s efforts:

If you click that “learn more” link, Google says, “Google Chat makes it easy to chat with people you have relationships with. In Google+, you can chat with anyone in your Circles who also has added you to their Circles. And, when you’re not using Google Plus, you’ll still be able to chat with them using Google products including, Gmail, the Google Talk client, iGoogle, Orkut and 3rd party apps.”

Previously, you could only chat with people if you knew their email address, so this opens up a whole new line of instant communication, and eliminates one of Facebook’s advantages in terms of features.

Rather than displaying all of your contacts in a single chat list, it will show you contacts from your most recent conversations that are online. You can also use the search box to find the others.

Chat is obviously one of the most social features of any product online. It’s direct, instant conversation. I don’t know how crucial it is to the success of Google+, but it certainly can’t hurt. I know Facebook chat gets used quite a bit.

Google needs to integrate the group messaging of the Google+ mobile app here as well. As it stands right now, I have an ongoing discussion going among myself and a few other people via the messaging feature, but no way to access that conversation from the web interface (or if I do, it’s extremely hidden).

It’s interesting that Google+ launched with video chat (hangouts) ahead of text chat, but now it has both, and should be better for it. By the way, you can video chat from the chat feature itself as well.

On its company blog, GroupMe writes:

Over the last few months, we had been in talks with Skype that started with discussions about potential commercial partnerships. As we got to know the core Skype team better, though, and as our conversations evolved, it quickly became evident that our visions were perfectly aligned. Both companies are focused on changing the way the world communicates, and helping people stay in touch with the people they really know. With a shared vision—an ambitious one—we decided our efforts to own real-time communications and the real life network could be best executed as one company.

This has been a remarkable year for GroupMe, and we believe that this is a big win. And not just a big win for GroupMe and our amazing investors, but also for New York City. As part of the deal, GroupMe will remain in New York, team intact, working on our standalone application. The major difference will be that we will now have access to Skype’s 175 million monthly connected users. 175 million people. That’s a very big deal. 

“This acquisition is another step towards our vision to provide a global multi-modal and multi-platform communications experience,” says Skype CEO Tony Bates on Skype’s blog. “It complements our existing leadership in voice and video communications by providing best in class mobile text-based communications and innovative features around group messaging that enable users to connect, share locations and photos and make plans with their closest ties.”

“This latest acquisition, coupled with our acquisition of Qik earlier this year, augments our role as an innovator in driving unique mobile user experiences,” he adds.

Qik would be the company’s live streaming video offering.

“The GroupMe team has created an incredibly sticky group messaging experience that works across mobile devices and platforms, making it a perfect addition to our voice, video and text products,” says Bates. “We’re excited about introducing their disruptive product to our global user base.”

Skype itself of course recently agreed to be acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 billion.

According to Tricia Duryee, citing people familiar with the matter, Skype is paying about $85 million for GroupMe. This is unconfirmed. Terms were not discussed by Skype or GroupMe.

The problem, which many of us have probably noticed, but few have really made an issue of in the press/Blogosphere is that it is now harder to find other friends who may actually be online and available to chat. That’s because Facebook is filtering this list of friends to the ones it assumes you’ll want to chat with.

Josh Constine at InsideFacebook has a new post discussing this, in which he shares the reasoning provided by Facebook’s Director of Product Peter Deng. Deng says, “The goal of the new design is to give more people faster access to the friends they message most. Looking at the early data of how people are engaging with and using Chat, things are moving in this direction.”

That may be true, but should it be at the cost of slower access to those we don’t necessarily talk to all the time, but are still friends with, and may feel the need to strike up a conversation to say hi every now and then? We’re already friends on Facebook aren’t we?

The nice thing about seeing when ANY of your friends were available online was that you might have noticed someone you hadn’t talked to in a long time and felt like saying hello. It almost served as a convenient way to keep in touch with those with whom you were once close, but don’t necessarily think about or have the time to write a message to on any given busy day. If you just happened to notice them in the available chat list, well that was a different story.

Now, you have to go so far as to search for that friend to even figure out if they’re available to chat, and if you don’t talk to them often enough for them to appear on your new chat list, what are the chances that you’re actually going to do this very often.

Facebook has come under criticism in recent months for the way it filters content in the news feed, and recent reports even indicate that a new unfiltered news feed is on the way, presumably in response to such criticism (though as it stands now, you can adjust your feed settings to show what you want it to show).

Facebook has been a big contributor to the “filter bubble” concept, in terms of filtering content, and now, it seems they’re filtering how we actually interact with our friends as well.

But at least we’re able get “faster access” to the friends we message the most. You know, because it was such a slow, cumbersome process before.

By the way, the system is flawed, because there are some people on my list that I never talk to, and there is someone I talked to a few days ago at length that is nowhere to be found on my list.