As Facebook usage continues to grow, many people rely on Facebook as their primary method for chatting in real time with their friends and family. I am not one of those people, but since many of my friends are, having a way to easily contact them in real time is very important. There have been attempts to make plugins for major IM clients such as Pidgin and Kopete that can work with Facebook, but they were difficult to maintain and did not always perform well.

A few days ago, Facebook announced that they have opened their chat system to XMPP, which is an open standard for chat communication. It is famous for the many Jabber chat systems that exist on the Internet and also for its adoption by Google as their protocol for Google Talk. Now, any client that can connect to XMPP will be able to connect to Facebook.

This is particularly good news for mobile devices that might have supported XMPP but did not have Facebook support. What follows are the steps you need to take to connect your chat client to Facebook chat. I have included Kopete for KDE as an example, but feel free to add more in the comments.
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