Tech Journal

Tags: facebook, IM

Facebook has announced that they are building a Jabber/XMPP interface for their Facebook IM service.

The Facebook IM service allows users to instant message their friend who are currently online browsing through Facebook.  The great thing is, everybody in  your friends list is already your contact on Facebook IM which takes out the hassle of adding friends into an IM client.

There were some rumors about Facebook taking the  chat service out of the browser sometime but now they announced that they definitely will.  Users will be able to chat with their contacts on Facebook with a IM client on the desktop without the need to log into the social network in the browser.  Think Google Talk IM client and the integrated Google Talk in Gmail.

PRESS RELEASE :

Since the launch of Facebook Chat, we've received a lot of positive feedback from users about being able to connect instantly with their friends on Facebook. With Chat fully launched and growing steadily, we've started working on more new features to enhance the Chat experience.

Right now we're building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to:

Users can securely authenticate and authorize applications to connect to Chat on their behalf and send messages to their friends just like they can on Facebook.

We will share more details as we get closer to launch, but we wanted to give you a heads up so you can start thinking about (or even start building) Chat into your applications.

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