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?)

Of course, Facebook is still about connections to other Facebook users, and all of the group and privacy controls are based on this.  So, this is how I picture XMPP federation working with Facebook:

• A user, who we will call “Joe,” uses another XMPP network but wants to talk to Facebook Chat users.
• Joe must have a Facebook account.
• Joe goes to his Facebook account and registers his XMPP handle by adding it to his profile (just like you can add additional e-mail addresses).
• Now, Facebook sends authentication requests from all of the users that Joe can talk to on Facebook Chat to Joe’s XMPP account.  Joe can then add them to his other XMPP contact list.
• Now, Joe can talk to Facebook Chat users from his other XMPP account.  Facebook Chat users using the web interface will see Joe just like they see any other Facebook user, along with his picture and a link to his profile or whatever.  Privacy settings that they have applied to Joe apply to his extra XMPP account too.  Since he registered his XMPP handle in his profile, everyone knows who he is, and Facebook makes this connection between his XMPP account and his Facebook account obvious to Facebook Chat users.

There you have it.  Simple for Facebook Chat users using the web UI — in fact, the user experience for them doesn’t change at all.  And convenient for people who already use another XMPP account to chat (like Google Talk).

Launching XMPP support closed this long-standing bug, which was the highest-voted bug on Facebook’s Bugzilla bug tracker.  I’d love to see similar support for the XMPP federation bug!

Update, 10:34 PM:

Just for reference, you can check out Facebook Chat’s XMPP implementation status at IMTrends.  Once they support XMPP federation, we should see green checkmarks next to the server-to-server entries (like this one).

Update, February 12, 2010:

Someone actually beat me to filing a bug for XMPP federation support.  (Though I am sure I searched for “XMPP” before filing my bug and it didn’t show up.)  I’ve changed the link above to point to the earlier bug.

If you hover over a contact and then click on the “Video and More” button, you get a nifty menu like this:

What I’m interested in is the option to “Always show” or “Never show” a contact.  If I have a contact that I don’t talk to very often, or if a contact has several accounts but only uses one of them most of the time, I may want to hide some of them from my list.  Additionally, there are some people that I might want to have on my list all the time, and not have them hidden at Google’s whim if I don’t talk to them very often.

Well, for some contacts, this setting seemed to be stuck on “Auto.”  You could make a selection, and a confirmation message would appear at the top of the screen, but the behavior of the contact on the list would not change, and if you pull up the menu again, it’s still there on “Auto.”

I’ve been following this thread (among others) in the Google Chat help forum.  A couple of solutions have been posted.

The first one, which will work for most Gmail users, is to just go to your iGoogle page, and use the chat contact list there to set your “Always show” and “Never show” preferences.  Somehow, this bug only affects the Gmail chat interface, and the one over at iGoogle works fine.

However, I’m a Google Apps user, and I don’t have a regular Gmail account.  As far as I know, there’s no way to use iGoogle with a Google Apps account.

So, this other solution, which was posted just yesterday by “zisvan” (thanks zisvan!), is a bit more tedious but it works fine with Google Apps accounts.

• Click “Contacts” in your Gmail account to bring up the Google contacts manager.  Locate the contact that you would like to “Always show” or “Never show.”
• Edit them, and remove the e-mail address associated with the contact you want to change on your chat list.  (Don’t delete the contact entry altogether, just remove the e-mail address and click “Save.”  If you have multiple e-mail addresses for the contact, just remove one of them.)  The contact will disappear from your chat list.
• Create a new contact with the same name as the contact you just edited.  Put the e-mail address on this new contact, with no other details.
• Now, the contact reappears on your chat list.  You can change the “Show in chat list” option and it will stick.
• Once you’re done, click on the “My Contacts” category in the contacts manager, and then click the “Find duplicates” button on the right.  It should find the duplicate contact that you just created, since you gave them the same name, and offer to merge them for you.  Go ahead and do this, and you’ll just have one contact again, with the e-mail address and whatever extra details you had stored with them before.
• Now, the contact is still in your chat list.  Furthermore, the “Show in contact list” option is stuck again, but instead of being stuck on “Auto,” it’s stuck on whatever you set it to.  If you ever want to change it again, you’ll have to repeat this process.

I’m not sure what causes this bug, but I found almost half of the contacts on my chat list to be affected by it.  Supposedly, Google is looking into it.  Hopefully, it will be fixed sooner or later!