BattleNet Chat, or "Cleaning Up Your Friends List"

I have a long friends list.

Very long.

But I don't have many people on it.

You see, my brother is an altoholic; my husband switches his main every expansion; and my husband's best friend has 9 level 80's so that he can employ every profession in the game -- including all three tailoring specialties and all three alchemy masteries.

I have all these alts in my friends list.

For folks like siblings, spouses, and friends, you want to keep in touch. These are the people that, if you make an alt to get away from the social crush of your guild, you give them the alt's name.

I get lonely on Birdy. It's the biggest drawback of playing her, that and the inability to do anything but Halaa with my guild (I even have tanks and healers on horde who love running randoms and taking dps along, and it's such a slap in the face for her to be separated from them just because I think Night Elves are pretty).

Being able to chat with friends while I'm on her is going to make a huge difference. The only thing that would be better is if I could faction transfer her and keep her a Night Elf, but that would never ever happen (or it would be as big an upheaval as the world getting sundered, because the lore would go all wacky).

With the Battle.net friend system, you can talk to any friend anywhere as long as they're playing a Blizzard game. They have to accept you as a friend to be friends, and some people will be more, shall we say, prolific in their friends than others, but you can hang out without having to be on the same faction, server, or game. (Husband will be frugal with his Battle.net friends, and I'll be a little less frugal. As evidenced by Facebook, where I friended girls I disliked from high school so they could be jealous that I got married, whereas husband canceled his account because it creeped him out.)

A guildmate suggested you could have the same chat functions with an instant messenger program, but I deeply hate instant messengers. I reinstall AIM once a year to say hi to an old friend, but then I'm stuck staring at the stupid little yellow icon day in and day out until I reformat my computer.

Blech.

This system will let me keep all my husband's alts, all my brother's characters, and all my good friends within chatting distance without swamping my friends list. My gal Jenny can whisper me to do Argent Dailies with her. Heck, I could whisper her from Birdy to help me kill Chillmaw. :D Bwahahaha, already finding ways to use my friends for personal gain.

I'm eager, also, for the dance studio. I know it's off topic, but I truly believe they're still working on it. Last we heard, it wasn't a "It's on our list" item, it was a "We're actively perfecting this" item. Imo, Blizzard isn't a company to just scrap something because an xpac comes up. They're a company that releases something when it's ready, even if it takes a while.