When Facebook famously updated their internal chat service, it was widely ridiculed as being useless and annoying. Hejibits.com captured the tone of the reaction brilliantly. Such is life when major change is introduced, although, the ability to hide the chat …

Five months ago, Microsoft announced that Hotmail users in Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S. could begin to chat with their Facebook friends while checking their email.  Now the integration of Hotmail and Facebook Chat is complete in every place where Facebook is available.

We’ll admit: this may not sound like a big deal insofar as it’s pretty simple to toggle between a Hotmail tab and a Facebook tab.  But the development at least goes to show that relations between Microsoft and Facebook are as good as ever.

The social network that acts as an online home to more than 500 million people intends to do a better job of letting them communicate with one another in the future.  This afternoon, Facebook mentioned some ways in which it’s improved its Chat feature and promised that further upgrades are on the way.

Earlier this month, Facebook started rolling out a chat feature, and as of now, the thing seems to be fully open.  All of the social network’s users can either talk to or ignore their friends at will.