Facebook made their ‘Facebook chat’ protocol all awesome and nice today by adding support for the Jabber/XMPP protocol. This means you can have facebook chat in Pidgin, Empathy, etc without the need for buggy third-party plugins! Hoorah!

Casey Ho, Pidgin dev supremo, blogged the following guide for adding Facebook chat in Pidgin: –

For the protocol type, select XMPP.
For the username, use your Facebook username. (see http://www.facebook.com/username/)
For the domain, use “chat.facebook.com”
For the password, use your Facebook password.

Now in advanced settings set the following:
Uncheck Require SSL
Set connect port to 5222
Set connect server to chat.facebook.com

Empathy
In theory the same steps should work on Empathy.

Osliner posted the following steps for Empathy in the comments: –

Jabber account
Login ID: username@chat.facebook.com
password: *****word
No encryption, and everything else is empty or default.

Make sure when you click “Add” in Empathy, that you then select “Reuse existing account” (Thanks to Karl)

Thanks to Ashutosh Rishi for the wake-up call and Casey Ho for the instructions.
Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk
empathy facebookchat pidgin