You can find out everything you need to know about this new application and download it here, we just installed it on a medium-spec Windows 7 64-bit laptop and on the whole we’re impressed, that said it did crash for us on one occasion and we spotted another couple of bugs and imperfections.

Installation is pretty painless and once installed you should find the program in your computer’s start menu, once you’ve ran the app it will also show up in the notification area of your Windows UI (see below). If you right click on the notification icon you can enable / disable chat sounds, dock the application to the right hand side of the screen, open the app, exit the app, log off or access help. On widescreen resolutions the dock to the right feature is particularly impressive.

As you’d expect, to use the app you will have to sign-in with your Facebook log-in credentials, once signed in you’ll see a list of contacts to chat with (just like you see in Facebook chat when you log into the website) – also there’s a notification area which update’s just like Facebook’s ticker. Below you can see the main user interface, if you chat with someone it opens in a new window, chat with somebody else and the conversation will show in a new tab within this window.

If you minimize the application the notification icon shows a message which tells you that you’ll still see messages and notification while the app runs in the background.

Sadly there are some problems and imperfections, firstly the app once crashed for us (see below), secondly group chat doesn’t work. Other things which didn’t impress us include the fact that there’s no option to remember your log-in credentials and the fact that selecting the ‘Log in’ option from the notification icon’s context menu doesn’t work for us, it just opens a tab in our default web browser telling us that we’re trying to navigate to a website which cannot be found.

All in all we are happy with the Facebook Messenger application, however there is room for improvement which we’re sure will arrive in the near future. If you installed the app and didn’t like it you can uninstall it by following these simple instructions, there’s lots of answers to other common frequent asked questions here.

Have you tried out the new Facebook Messenger application for Windows? If so, have you experienced any problems? Are there any additional features you’d like to see? Let us know below.

The social networking site is joining the already crowded market, which already has the BlackBerry Messenger and Apple’s upcoming iMessage. According to Guardian.co.uk it will also rival features of Google+, but presently it is available in the US and not in the UK.

It will combine the existing Facebook Messages feature that is available on the website, which contains emails, chats, instant messages, and texts. Users of the application can send messages to their Facebook friends or other people via the users address book, and are delivered by notification or text.

Introducing the new application Facebook engineer Lucy Zhang said “More and more of us rely on our phones to send and receive messages. But it isn’t always easy to know the best way to reach someone on their phone”.

Now with the new application users will now know once the send button has been pressed they will be confident that it “will reach the person right away.” Zhang was one of the founders of mobile group-messaging startup Beluga, which was taken over by Facebook earlier this year. Beluga’s technology is mainly what the Facebook Messenger app is built on.

There is also the ability for location data and photos to be attached to conversations, and code has been discovered by 9 to 5 Mac that suggests that video conferencing could be added at a later date. Despite losing market share Research In Motions BBM still remains popular with over 45 million users.

Apple’s take on the service was first reveled back in June at the WWDC event, and will be available as part of the iOS 5 launch later this year. Google recently launched the Huddle feature of its Google+ social website, which allows for group messaging for Android and iOS users Google contacts.

Facebook will be looking to its new application to keep its users interested as reports of the time users spend on the site falls surface. The fact that the application allows users to also message non-Facebook contacts from their address books may appeal too many though.