Let’s get real here. Adding in an instant messenger platform to such a hugely popular social platform is going to be trouble without establishing user democracy is going to be trouble through and through.

Now in your case, you are a very social person online, and very approachable at that. You’re whole job is to get to know this community to a certain degree, and interact with it. Over time, you have met hundreds, if not thousands of people from this industry. People would love to meet you, because frankly, you’re a helluva cool person. Can’t blame them on that.

Your grumblings are legit on this one. I know that the developers of this application only commented a few spaces above me about their goals, but frankly these are the kinds of things that make the difference between an alpha, beta or release candidate product.

Let this be a lesson in wanting attention versus putting out a quality product. Hammer out the bugs based off of alpha release info, work on it in beta, go public in RC to generate buzz.

This kind of facebook app has a place that is long overdue and empty. Take your time, nail it out and impress the world.

Second, I wanted to address your privacy concerns. I totally agree with your points and wanted to let you know that the privacy features you mentioned (blocking, grouping, etc…) are at the top of our feature list (right after resolving the post-launch bugs/issues).

Lucas (my co-founder) and I are very strong supporters of users’ privacy and have been througout our entire careers. Facebook has a lot of privacy features which we love as well… and we’re working quickly to catch up in Social.IM in a few days the many features they’ve implemented over the past three years. I thank you in advance for your patience, and I promise being able to block individual users will be available very very soon (with more privacy/grouping features coming after that).

Second, I wanted to clarify a potential misconception in your post. Facebook isn’t involved in any way with this client. Social.IM is built on top of Facebook’s developer API, much like all of the other “Facebook apps” out there: we just happen to be a desktop application and not a web-based one. So, Facebook is not to blame for any of the complaints you have about our product: that’s entirely our fault and ours to fix.

We’re posting our latest updates to our blog at http://social-im.blogspot.com/. It’ll be the best way to find out when we’ve made the privacy changes you requested.

In the meantime…thank you for trying the app and best regards,

-Yanda-

And so you know, the toast notification is that popup that comes out of the bottom right of the screen. I guess because it pops out… like toast.