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.

Facebook’s tour currently has a nice feature that explains how to access their chat from Pidgin,Adium, and Apple’s iChat, and even gives you the exact use name you will need.

Kopete configuration

1. Click “Settings” in the top menu and then click “Configure”.
2. Under “Accounts”, click “Add Account…”
3. Select “Jaber” from the list of protocol choices.
4. For username, type your Facebook  name (what is normally at the end of your Facebook URL)  For example, if your Facebook name is bobblehead, you will need to enter bobblehead@chat.facebook.com If, for some reason, that username does not work, you can check the Facebook Chat page in their site tour, click “Other – Windows/Mac/Linux” and see what your username is supposed to be.
5. Password is your normal Facebook password.
6. Under Connection preferences, leave all three options unchecked (no SSL).
7. Click OK, and you’re done!

Facebook is currently telling users to disable SSL, and I am not sure if this is how they intend to keep it permanently. I also could not get profile images to display in Kopete, although users might have more success with other clients. I did test it with one of my friends and did not experience any anomalies. He also did not report any strange characters or other problems coming from my end.

It seems to do a good job of keeping track of when users are idle on their Facebook pages, just like the web-based Facebook chat. Certain other features like voice and video will not be supported unless Facebook adds those features, even if other XMPP connections support it.

Overall, it works very well and feels like a normal IM chat protocol, complete with emoticons.  Now, it will be that much more difficult for you to hide from your old friends.

Microblogging has because pretty popular recently with Twitter being the best known of these services. I personally haven’t signed up for Twitter specifically, however the basic concept has spread to other services. I’ve never been a big fan of personal blogging, but I’ve found over time that my GMail status messages tend to give a pretty good idea of what I’m up to. I also use the status message as an excuse to share some of my favorite quotes and links. A while back, I decided to try to record all of my status messages so that I could go back later and find an old link I posted, or see what day it was that I had made an announcement. I began looking online for a service that would automatically read my GMail status message and log it for future use.

I never found exactly what I was looking for, but I did find juick.com. Yes, it’s in Russian, but that actually doesn’t really cause a problem for what we’re going to be doing today.

Juick is a web service that takes XMPP messages and creates a microblog using those messages as entries in the blog. There’s no registration, no signup, no hassle. You simply send a XMPP message to “juick@juick.com” and it creates a blog based on the username you sent from and begins recording submissions.

1. Add “juick@juick.com” to your contact list in your Jabber client or GMail.
2. Prepare whatever message you want juick to record
3. Send your message

That’s it. Juick will respond immediately telling you the message has been posted, and will provide you with a web address to view your new entry. To view your blog as a whole, send juick a message with just the word “LOGIN” (all caps) and it will reply with a link to your blog.

Without any hassle, I can now record all my witty remarks and Beastie Boys quotes in one place. Ideally, I’d like something that would automatically read my status messages and update the blog on its own, but with juick there’s just one additional step of pasting my status message into a chat box.

Those who have Twitter accounts may want to take a look at tweet.IM. I haven’t tried it as I don’t have a Twitter account, but it looks to be about the same type of thing as what we’ve talked about today.