Facebook Chat on Your Desktop IM Clients

Yes! Now any IM client or messenger could support Facebook Chat. You don’t have to stay logged in to Facebook in your browser and can receive messages from your friends, right on your IM client. Facebook Messenger is probably the only thing that has been lacking in otherwise a complete social network. Now Facebook Chat supports Jabber/XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), an open protocol for instant messaging, that can be integrated into any desktop or web based software. Google Talk also uses same protocol. This could benefit both, Facebook users as well as Facebook developers.

For Facebook users, it has been long due to have a trustable Facebook Messenger that could give them access to Facebook chat even after they closed their browser. Browser chat has also been missing important features like message alerts and sounds etc. Now we may see improved applications embedding Facebook chat.

Facebook developers get an exciting new prospect to work upon. Theycan integrate Facebook chat in web applications or desktop clients. To make it easier, Facebook is also launching support for Facebook Connect that will address the issues Facebook chat client developers may face. And great thing is that adding your Jabber based chat client to Facebook is very easy, just like implementing the Facebook Connect is.

Important Points to consider:

For Facebook Chat on 3rd party apps, you MUST have a Facebook Username

This is a must now. If you want to use a Jabber based desktop client to use Facebook Chat, you must have a Facebook username. Reason: Your chat identity will be username@chat.facebook.com. If you haven’t got a username, you can’t access Facebook Chat on AIM, Pidgin, Adium, iChat or any other IM client. To get a Facebook username, go to http://www.facebook.com/username.

When Logged into IM, You’ll Appear Online on Facebook

If you are logged into a third party chat client, you will appear online on Facebook.

Chat Settings can be changed from Facebook only, not from third party chat clients. You can allow/block friends from Facebook Chat after logging into Facebook. Only friends you chose will appear on Facebook Chat clients.