When Facebook launched their instant messaging system a while ago they knew it would be popular simply due to the masses of people who already call the site home, though it seems it was good enough that people are now ditching traditional IM programs like Windows Live Messenger, GTalk and Yahoo Chat.

Facebook’s engineers today revealed that FbChat is now serving over one billion messages per day. While that may not sound so phenomenal considering how many more the other big guns serve, though you should begin to take notice when you consider that the system is less than a year old.

So, will it ever take over from the likes of AOL Messenger? Probably not, but it’s still a massive leap for something that’s been around for such a short amount of time.