Cammie New and added change to Fanpop can only broaden and enhance the site, in my opinion anyway.

rusty746454 I guess that is a way of looking at it, i am a person who hates change, i dont know why but i always have but i know that change is needed if we wish to grow and reach greater lengths in life

harold While I enjoy the IM, I must admit that I don't understand why it was implemented here. It doesn't seem like it would help ad revenue, and there's a lot of other features/enhancements that the users have been requesting for a long time. I don't think that anyone was leaving the site before to be able to IM their friends - I suspect that most people were, like me, using IM on the side. Now that it's literally front and center, it's going to distract at least me from posting content, rating, commenting, and discovering/providing aid to new fans. It already has! It certainly disrupts ratings, for me: loading an image that seems interesting, I click on the rating I want to give it, and the rating doesn't stick, because the page hasn't finished loading the IM chat window on top of it! Then I either have to interrupt my chat to rate, or I have to scroll the window so that the rating is up in the narrow band still visible above the IM chat window. Finally, I think it makes me too invasive: nobody wants to hear as much from me as I've already pushed on several users today! Edit: I realized I didn't answer your essential question: does this mean the site is trying to get too big? No, I don't think so. That would require a lot of business development planning/justification. To me, this smacks much more of a "it's possible to do this? Cool, let's do it!" development decision. On the other hand, it is (as others have pointed out) one other way to get people to stay on the site longer...at least in theory. In practice, I see people log on and log off in less than a minute. That may be how they were behaving before the IM chat feature was introduced, of course, but it suggests to me that having this feature isn't keeping people on the site. A good thing? It may cut down the number of conversational props that people send to each other!

ladolcevita I agree with both Harold and Cammie. IM does interrupt me quite a lot, and I have to open a page in a new tab first, and that [i]really[/i] annoys me, because say I only have, like 2 minutes, I can only do one thing, etc. [b]But[/b], IM does have an upside, which you haven't been looking at. For example, I have started to write a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction called Common Enemies. I like getting feedback from other Fanpoppers before I post the chapters, and IM is the perfect way to do that. Sure, I could PM someone, but a live chat Is the ideal way to do something like that because you can edit, say a sentence and then run it by the person you are talking to... if all that stuff makes sense... But, to answer your question: No, It won't affect Fanpoppers that badly, and if it does... that shows that we really aren't as close-knit as we think. Sorry to end it on a bad note.

ArabellaElfie I like it in theory but not practice. I, like Harold, have been finding myself so slowed down that I tend now to either chat in im or to do my usual rating, commenting, etc. I do wish it popped out into a new window as the chatrooms do. I love talking to my friends on here but I wish it wasn't as evasive.

housekid45 no. I think I'll just use the good ol' private message system.