Yesterday, Facebook announced that Facebook Chat now fully supports the XMPP protocol.
This is great news, because we can now all ditch whatever hacked-together methods we were all using to connect to the Facebook Chat service with Pidgin, if you were ever using one. I’ll also cover how to transfer your logs over from the old connection method to the official connection method below.
CLIENT SETUP
1. You’ll first need to go to your Accounts menu, then to Manage Accounts, then choose Add…
2. From here, you need the following settings:
- Protocol: XMPP
- Username: {Your Facebook username, not your email address, to get this you should be able to go to your Facebook homepage, and hover over your “View My Profile” link, it will be http://www.facebook.com/username and you’ll need the username part, and that is all.}
- Domain: chat.facebook.com
- Password: {Your Facebook password}
3. Switch to the Advanced tab, and uncheck “Require SSL/TLS” and check “Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams”
4. That’s it, if you were using an old method to connect to Facebook, be sure to remove that account!
LOG TRANSFER
In your Pidgin log directory, usually located at:
%APPDATA%Roaming.purplelogs (Vista/7)
-OR-
%APPDATA%.purplelogs (XP)
unless you set up PURPLEHOME environmental variable (like I did), but if you did this, you should know where they reside… and as for Linux users, you should also know where your log directory is already…
You’ll see some folders in there, with various logs for accounts.
You will have a folder called “facebook” with a “username” directory inside it, and now a new one called “jabber” with a “username@chat.facebook.com” directory inside of it.
In order to transfer the logs, you need to rename all the folders in your “logs/facebook/username” directory from
######
to
u######@chat.facebook.com
and then move them to the “logs/jabber/username@chat.facebook.com” directory.
All your logs should continue to work properly after this.
