I am currently a relatively new in the field of programming, and I am helping with a friend of mine on building a social network. It is already live picxter.com. However we are looking on implementing a chat feature for our users and the owner told me I should use a Java applet as it would be best suited for our needs. However is this possible? We are not trying to make a chat site type of chat. We are trying to build a chat like Facebook.
Don't use Java for these sorts of applications! Using Java in your browser is not a very good idea in general. You could try to do it in JavaScript using AJAX (which is syntactically very similar to Java and by far not as slow, doesn't require a runtime environment and isn't as risky [you can argue about that, to be honest] in terms of security).