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XMPP Facebook Chat


I get a lot of complaints from people who say that the Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin is “flakey” and disconnects a lot. I’d just like to say, “Its not my fault!” 🙂
I was talking on the phone to someone at Facebook and asked them if they used my plugin. They said “no, I don’t use the public one its really buggy but I am beta testing our new interface internally which is a lot better.” Once he found out that I actually wrote the plugin, he did a bit of a turnaround and went on to explain that the server software isn’t really the greatest, that it puts a heavy load on their servers and that it was actually all their fault that my plugin was so bad 🙂

So, after a bit of snooping around, I discovered the details of the XMPP servers. You can even (almost) connect to them. For now, it looks like you have to be authorized in their beta programme (or probably just be working at Facebook) to be able to use it.

The XMPP server is running at chat.facebook.com:5222 and it uses DIGEST-MD5 for authentication as well as something called “X-FACEBOOK-PLATFORM” for SASL. In Pidgin you can set up the account by using your username, with the domain chat.facebook.com, disabling the “Require SSL/TLS” option in the advanced tab. Doesn’t look like its working with s2s yet, but hard to tell without being able to log in.

So give it a go, maybe your account slips through the cracks and you can log in. Will been keen to hear from anyone about their successes/failures with this.

This entry was posted on 2009-11-04, 5:26 pm and is filed under Facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  1. #1 by Jan Girlich on 2009-11-05 - 10:05 am

    I just tried as you suggested, but had not much luck. First you have to pay attention and replace the @ in your login emailaddress with a %40. But then I just got a “530: service not available” Too bad, that would be really cool!

  2. #2 by Dave on 2009-11-05 - 2:19 pm

    yup, I got 530 too. For the login name, I used my vanity url on facebook. (Vanity URL’s == prepping for jabber? maybe) Hope it works soon. I am unsure how to set up DIGEST-MD5 and X-FACEBOOK-PLATFORM for SASL on my end with Pidgin, but maybe it’s not necessary. Next up: XMPP for Myspace Chat! Thanks for your great work in the interim on the pidgin plugin!

  3. #3 by Aris on 2009-11-16 - 5:43 pm

    503 Service Unavabiable.

  4. #4 by Dave on 2009-12-17 - 1:04 pm

    Any updates on this front?

  5. #5 by cagri kilit on 2010-02-18 - 12:50 am

    you should use your username for facebook chat for xmpp not your email address. you can set a username via account settings in FB. and wait a day for login (not kidding – there is a propagation on FB side, your username wont be available to chat immediately) but in the end.. it works perf. fine

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