Yesterday, Facebook finally launched XMPP support for Facebook Chat. (More about XMPP here.) This is something that they announced that they were working on back in May, 2008 — almost two years ago. After a long time (of mostly silence), here we have it — you can now connect to Facebook using (almost) any XMPP client, including popular “universal” chat clients like Pidgin, Trillian, Adium, Digsby, Miranda, Empathy, etc., using the XMPP support that they already have. This also paves the way for Facebook Chat to become one of the most used IM protocols, up in the ranks with AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live, and Google Talk.
I’m a bit disappointed, but not surprised, that this initial launch of XMPP support comes without support for XMPP federation (“S2S”). If we had S2S support for Facebook Chat, then Facebook users could talk with users on any XMPP/Jabber network, and vice versa. This would also enable a particularly cool bridge between Facebook Chat and Google Talk, which are both based on XMPP, and it might even push AIM and WLM more towards supporting XMPP, so that we could have a truly universal IM network on the Internet. (We have it for e-mail already… why not for IM?)