Facebook Now Supports Jabber/XMPP
supersloshy writes "Facebook Chat has so far only been meant to be used in a web browser, and instant messaging applications have had a hard time implementing its undocumented protocol. Today, Facebook is making this job much easier by enabling support for XMPP to access its chat service. AOL's AIM and the Empathy Instant Messenger are also including pre-set Facebook options, due to already supporting XMPP."
Here are instructions for setting up XMPP Facebook chat with popular instant messaging clients, including Pidgin and Adium.
Now if only they'd setup federation so people can talk to those on Facebook from their own XMPP domain. This combined with Google Talk can bring XMPP near the critical mass of users necessary to finally abandon the proprietary protocols I've despised for so long. Good riddance Windows/MSN/Live Messenger! I look forward to the not-so-distant future where everyone can communicate on IM without having accounts with several non-interoperable IM networks. Wishful thinking?
That's the whole point of XMPP. If all IM was XMPP then IM WOULD work like e-mail. For this to work, Facebook still needs to enable Federation but it's a huge step in the right direction. The world needs more XMPP networks. Once the number of XMPP IM users outnumber the users of legacy "cluster-f**k" proprietary protocols it will become common sense to drop the proprietary garbage in order to gain interoperability with everyone else. What a nice utopia that would be. :)