Ameliorations 1.0

So apparently the king of social networking sites, Facebook (disclosure: I have a site and fan page on FB), is looking to make waves into the instant messaging world. How are they looking to do this? By employing the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) for their chat service. With the code already installed at chat.facebook.com it should be only a matter of time before Facebook makes the big announcement to their users. The question is, when?

I ask that because, as I was looking up information on this change, I discovered at least two articles (here and here) that are over a year old, posted 14 May 2008 and 17 January 2008 respectively. The only recent piece about this is relatively low on details by comparison.

So what does this mean for AOL (owners of ICQ and AIM), Yahoo and MSN? Probably not too much as more then a trickle of their users have been using XMPP to connect to those services (via transport gateways in XMPP, enabled only on certain servers) for years. I personally have known about jabber servers offering transport gateways for at least 5 years, if not more. What this does mean, though, is that XMPP, with the addition of 70+ million users from Facebook, will become the de facto king of the IM protocols overnight. Just as soon as Facebook goes live with their server.

The server is there, and it does respond, but currently trying to connect to it returns, for me at least, a 503 service unavailable error with my client, Pidgin. Also, the server requires a plaintext authorization at the moment (bad Facebook, do you want your users having their login names and passwords sniffed on demand?) so I do not recommend any current Facebook users to try and use it unless you’ve created a throwaway account.

UPDATE: The creator of the Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin made a post on 4 November 2009 here. Apparently FB is testing out a few things, which is good. Extended beta programs ensure a more solid product release which would be important for an immediate move over of over 70 million users.

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