Your experience matches mine, it seems to me that gchat, msn, facebook and twitter are quite similar in practice to a big IRC server than the man and woman in the street can use. A lot of the same issues crop up, spammers, impersonation, security, who controls the logs. I can appreciate how people use it to keep in touch with remote friends, but I think rather than handing over so much often boring and useless, othertimes damagingly revealing info to facebook they'd be better served by infrequent international calls to each other.