How do I launch a separate window for Facebook chat?

Well, I could tell you but I'd have to kill you.

No, just kidding. :-)

Turns out that's pretty easy, but you do have to wrestle with the frustrating inconsistencies of Facebook's chat system. I find that about 50% of the time when I load a page on Facebook I get a "Chat Not Available" error on the bottom of the page, meaning that I can't actually chat with anyone because it's not connected. Not so good. Fortunately, reloading the page and a bit of patience seems to fix the problem.

Once you do have a little indicator on the bottom of your browser page showing you how many friends are available to chat at any given time:

I have a lot of Facebook friends, so there are a fair number available to chat at any given time, as you can see.

Click on the menu item that shows you how many friends are available to chat and it'll pop up a big list of them. Look up at the top:

Click on "Options" and...

You'll want to choose "Pop out Chat" and suddenly a new window launches:

Cool. Now you can see a list of everyone who is available to chat (with their status) and this also shows what it looks like if you have more than one chat going. Here you can see I'm about to send a "Hello" message to my friend Zach.

That should get you going, hope this is helpful! In fact, thanks for questing for Facebook help here on Ask Dave Taylor. if you have other Facebook questions, don't forget to ask me so I can help decode the edges of this tremendously popular social network.