We believe you should be able to connect with your Facebook friends everywhere. We’re happy to announce that now you can with Facebook Chat. Starting today, the more than two billion chat messages sent on the site every day can be sent from your favorite desktop instant messaging client.
By integrating Facebook Chat with your preferred instant messenger, you’ll never miss a message when you have to navigate away from Facebook and you’ll be in control of how and where you chat with your Facebook friends. Simply connect your Facebook account with the instant messaging client of your choice and start chatting. You will not need to stay logged in to Facebook.com to continue to access your Facebook friends.
If you don’t want all of your online friends to appear, you can adjust which Friend Lists show up in chat by adjusting them on Facebook. To go offline, you can either close your instant messaging client or click “go offline” in your Facebook Chat options. As always, your conversations will remain completely private and only between you and your Facebook friends.
To make Facebook Chat available everywhere, we are using the technology Jabber (XMPP), an open messaging protocol supported by most instant messaging software, including iChat, Pidgin, Adium, Miranda and more.
We’ve also built support for Facebook Chat into Facebook Connect for developers wishing to build chat experiences into their website, desktop or mobile instant-messaging applications and services. If you already have an AOL Instant Messenger account, you can check this out by connecting your Facebook Chat using the latest version of AIM.
To get started chatting, please visit the Facebook Chat section of the site tour for instructions on how to connect and for examples of instant messaging clients you can connect with. We hope you enjoy chatting with your friends wherever you go.
