Wednesday 10 February 2010

XMPP, meet Facebook...

So, it seems the Facebook has finally added support for logging in to their Chat via XMPP. This is, of course, awesome so people stop asking about it, but also terrible since it took them so darn long. That meant a lot of horrible hacks just to get it working in the interim. (No offence Eion, I just mean the scraping, not the code.)

This announcement comes straight from the developer blog. You need to have set up a username (which you can check here). Casey's blog has all the screenshots you need to figure it out. The only downside is it doesn't use encrypted streams.

The biggest problem, though? Having to organize a few hundred buddies into their correct contacts.

1 comment:

DoktorYak said...

I think the main problem with this method is that SSL must be deactivated, exposing some of the content to 3rd party eaves dropper.

It might be interesting to have a XMPP-based plugin (instead of the JSON based one) support FaceBook's peculiarity like "X-FACEBOOK-PLATFORM" SASL authentication, and turning on or off the list-to-group mapping.

Another plugin supporting automatic contact grouping (based on other chat handles declared into the users profile) would also be interesting. (If an FaceBook user has a Skype handle on its profile page, such a plugin could propose to group the together).
As Google has similar profiles in its "contacts", a similar plugin could help.