What if you could display your online chat friends as just their faces? Why do you need all that extra clutter on your desktop? Furthermore, why do you even need to use Facebook Chat in your web browser when you can do all this using Adium?
Firstly, for those not familiar with Adium, it is an alternative to iChat, but with so much more. Adium allows you to put all your various chat clients 'under one roof' so to speak. Your friends on Yahoo, MSN Messenger, AIM, Jabber, Google Chat, and of course Facebook can all be accessed from this unified chat client and limit the clutter of having many different chat clients open.
I won't go into the setting up of your various accounts, assuming you already have done this and now have an active, working scenario and can see your various friends. You can refer to the Adium documentation if you need help setting up accounts.
Adium has a variety of display options from busy to minimal, however none of them give you just your friends faces. Here's how to do that.
Open Adium's Preferences, go to Appearance, then choose Aqualicious as both your Color Theme and List Layout. Next set your Window Style to 'Borderless Window' and your maximum width to 38 pixels. Set your opacity to zero and turn on both vertical and horizontal automatic sizing (check-mark the boxes).
Next, click the 'Customize...' button for List Layout. Under Contacts, make sure the alignment is left; show user icon is left; and icon size is 38x38 pixels. Now some tinkering is probably in order to make your contact list just show your friends' faces. You can adjust all the spacing to zero under Spacing. It helps if a few of your friends are online.
Viola! Your friends are just their pictures.
Now you can put this 'gallery' of your friends anywhere you want. I choose to snap it to the left top of the screen under the Apple Menu.
[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. I didn't really care for it so I changed the settings back to what they were before. If you want to try this, I suggest taking screen shots of your previous settings before tinkering, in case you want to revert.]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110104073407911