Reading this article was very very painful... and honestly, everyone here is hitting the nail on the head - they are just exposing how much info they are collecting about people. Facebook is the next Experian/TransUnion/Equifax. In the past (I worked in corp. security and investigations) you had to go to ChoicePoint and have law enforcement-like credentials to get a good background profile and picture of someone else. As more and more of this info is aggregated by Facebook, investigators will go to them for a much richer profile that could have ever hoped for.
My gut is that this is just a trend right now. Eventually people will pull back once it gets old. And trust me, things get old. Remember chat? Everybody was crazy about it. There have been many trends that have gotten old too. Just like in fashion,music,video, trends change.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Chat isn't "old", its just taken for granted now. What's more likely is that sharing every bit of irrelevant data about your life will go the way of chat, in that it becomes so commonplace that isn't not even thought about anymore.
Are you talking about chat or instant messaging? Those two are different in my view. We use IMs a lot at work. Probably even more than email. Chats get created every now and again, but realistically, it's much less used than IM.
The only place I see chat as really being useful, is for support on websites and applications. However, again it's mostly one-to-one, so it's basically a temporary IM.
Onion really has a great parody of this: http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...