Facebook Announces The Chat Heads Feature That Is Available Immediately On iPhones And iPads

Facebook continues to adapt and the social network tries it again with chatting on the iPhone and the iPad.

The announcement came Tuesday as Facebook announced the Chat Heads feature that will be featured on the Facebook Home, as well the iPhone and the iPad.

The Chat Heads feature, which was originally announced as part of Facebook's Home Android software experience, allows you to message with Facebook friends. Instead of a notification along the top of your screen, a small circular icon with a friend's profile photo pops up. But while Chat Heads will pop up within any app on Facebook Home on Android phones -- email, Twitter, Yelp -- on the iPhone those Chat Heads pop up only when you are in the Facebook app, according to ABC News.

It won't be a nuance when using the phone because if you want to communicate with your Facebook friends, you'll have to be on the opened application.  

"Chat Heads will appear within the Facebook app," Corey Ondrejka, Facebook VP of mobile engineering, said at the "All Things D: Dive Into Mobile" conference in New York today. "Apple doesn't give hooks to be persistent across the entire apps."

The update to the Facebook app for the iPhone and iPad app is available Tuesday in the App Store, however, you might not see the Chat Head or sticker functionality immediately, according to ABC News.

Ondrejka said at the conference today that Facebook would release the first update for Facebook Home during the second week of May.