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.

Comments

Steam Chat

[bucky0]

Man, if steam chat would support jabber, I would be a step closer to combining all my communication to the same program. Valve probably wouldn't do it though :/

Re:Steam Chat

[Hadlock]

Came here to post this, found out I was beaten by the FP. Are you listening Valve???
 
Somebody mod this up. Between gchat and steam, that covers 90% of my non-buisness e-socialization. Also it'd be nice to message the server admin on his phone to rcon in and reboot the server when he's not at his computer (never, it seems like).

Federation?

[Denis Lemire]

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?

Re:Federation?

[TheRaven64]

This probably wouldn't be too much of an issue if not many people have buddies on other xmpp servers, but could be disastrous if it becomes popular

No, that's not the issue. It's a problem if lots of people have multiple buddies on the same remote server. XMPP was designed to follow the email model, where you have lots of small servers (for a few people, maybe a company, possibly for users of an ISP who don't have another server they can use). In this case, it is entirely reasonable to send a copy of the presence stanza to each remote server. It's only if most of your contacts are on the same server, but it is not the server that you are using, where this is a problem. In that case, there will be some redundant server-to-server data.

Saying that this means that it 'doesn't scale well' is hyperbole to put it mildly. Even the article you link to doesn't say that, it simply says that it's possible to improve the scalability. I run a Jabber server with just a few users and, although my numbers for stanzas reflect theirs, they are misleading. Most presence stanzas that I receive are quite small compared to message and info-query stanzas, so the numbers are very different when you look at the total bandwidth used by each one. The shortest message stanza that I could find in my log was 20% longer than the longest presence stanza. A typical message stanza is 200-300% the size of a typical presence stanza.

Note that, if both servers support XEP-33, then this problem doesn't exist at all; they can use the extended addressing to send a single copy of the stanza to the remote server, without any modification to the client or the core protocol.

No security

[scott_karana]

I couldn't help but notice the conspicuous instructions to "Uncheck TLS/SSL security" in each of the clients.
I really hope that doesn't come back to bite anyone in the ass, there's enough spam on other parts of Facebook already.

Re:No security

[Hurricane78]

LOL. What would be the point in using encryption to connect to a server that is not trustworthy in the first place?
Besides: Is you e-mail encrypted?

And it’s far from the worst WTF.
The worst WTF is, that in order to use it, you have to give them your phone number!!!
Yeah right. What’s next? A body cavity search?

Luckily I don’t have to, so I won’t. Facebook can seriously just fuck right off!

Re:No Kopete?

[socceroos]

There is for Kopete, because it will make us KDEers feel important.

Re:changes

[Ultra64]

Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television

Don't be that guy.

Re:Yet another IM. . .

[hldn]

and if IM worked like email we'd get messages all day long about how to make our penises bigger.

Re:Yet another IM. . .

[Denis Lemire]

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. :)

Re:changes

[socceroos]

I'm not, thats about television.........

Re:changes

[JustOK]

dude, dissing FaceBook on ./ AND getting modded Troll for it is an awesome feat!

Re:changes

[turbotroll]

does that mean you have no friends too? ;)

I don't, for instance. I only have people I hate slightly less then the others, but that isn't same as the widely accepted definition of "friends".

Please don't stop

[Kupfernigk]

XMPP is the future, but it will only be the future so long as the pressure is kept up to get service providers to adopt open standards. The moment they see an advantage in lock-in they will adopt proprietary "extensions".

XMPP is the best thing to happen in the messaging protocol world for many years, we need to make sure that it continues to develop (especially server to server) and be as widely deployed as possible.

Disclaimer: Our company produces a system management product that uses XMPP as its first line fault notification. I would prefer even the most backward MS shop to have heard of it, and not to confuse it with the horror that is MSN.