Facebook chat supports XMPP, with ejabberd

Posted by Mickaël Rémond on November 05, 2009

Facebook is preparing the launch of their XMPP connection interface. It means that users will be able to use Facebook with any type of XMPP clients, ranging from desktop to mobile clients.

This is a huge news for XMPP because it consolidates the protocol as the de facto open standard for Instant Messaging and Presence. Facebook adds about 300 million potential users that can now use XMPP for chatting. This adds to large Google Talk figures and the many other large deployments around the world, like Yandex and Live Journal. XMPP could become the most largely used instant messaging protocol in the coming months!

Facebook announced on their developer blog they had the intention to support the XMPP protocol in May 2008: Using Facebook Chat via Jabber.

It now seems the launch is close as the XMPP software stack has been deployed on chat.facebook.com, as our bot at IMtrends have found out: chat.facebook.com on IMtrends.

We are proud that this XMPP support is built on a customized ejabberd XMPP server as announced several times by Facebook development team, including one of their latest conferences in Edinburgh in September 2009: Functional Programming at Facebook by Chris Piro and Eugene Letuchy.

The missing piece is currently what login and password to use to connect, but I am sure it will be announced by Facebook in due time.

Good job Facebook team!

Update 10 Feb 2010: Official Facebook XMPP support has been launched. Read Facebook Chat Now Available Everywhere.



Categories: Jabber / XMPP  
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Comments

anonymous avatar

LOL, you need a reality check, business is ALL about owning and retaining your customers.

Do you think Citrix bought Xen for the good of the open source community or to gain control of a better product?

Do you think Oracle bought Sun Microsystems because they like their kit or that they get control of their biggest upcoming threat that way (MySQL)?

There is an insidious trend in business to play ‘nice’ and look like your assisting open source, but in reality they are simply gaining control to stall development and keep their own products art the for.

Posted by Howard on 19 Jan 2010 at 14:03



 
anonymous avatar

Great information….

Posted by education on 21 Jan 2010 at 12:41



 
anonymous avatar

It’s great news to hear Facebook is finally going to use XMPP, I really don’t like being logged into the Facebook website just to talk to people and the Pidgin plug-in has far too many flaws to be considered “stable”

Posted by vista error on 24 Jan 2010 at 11:54



 
anonymous avatar

@vista error

you just copied and pasted some of my comment! I agree with exactly what you say ;-)

Posted by Ian Hawdon on 24 Jan 2010 at 12:29



 
anonymous avatar

FB via XMPP is now live!
http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php

Posted by Marc on 12 Feb 2010 at 00:02



 
anonymous avatar

Tried it yesterday. Absolutely lovely at first sight. But I soon found out that they missed the whole point of being able to talk to people on other jabber servers. There seem to be no server to server functionality. This has to be enabled soon.

Posted by Erik on 18 Feb 2010 at 08:46



 

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