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.

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

[darkpixel2k]

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.

Yeah--that's a big "What the fuck, facebook?"....in this day and age, it's tough to find XMPP software that flat-out doesn't support TLS. Even rolling your own in Python supports TLS...

Re:Federation?

[Cozminsky]

Given that the interserver federation in xmpp doesn't scale well ( see http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Scalability [about.psyc.eu] ), I'm guessing the thought of federation is too scary an option for facebook. 60% of the packets in an xmpp network are presence packets and xmpp uses an extremely naive way of distributing these (i.e. it sends an xmpp presence message for each user in the buddy list, even if many of the users are on the same xmpp server and the presence packet could be only sent once for all of them and exploded by the server at the other end). 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. I'm guessing they'd also be reticent to do this because it would decrease their lockin of users, if you don't need a facebook account to talk to facebook users why would you bother using facebook.

Re:Quality of Service

[dlgeek]

I don't know about the stability of chat in general (I often notice outages where it's completely unavailable), but it should fix the laggy-state issue you're concerned about. Your issue is caused by the fact that to create an AJAX client, you basically have to constantly poll the server from the client to get state updates. With XMPP, you can push state-change notifications so they happen almost instantly.