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.

So Facebook recently changed its home page around a bit. Most users are used to seeing everybody’s updates on their friends list, and in reverse-chronological order (newest up top). This latest update defaulted Facebook to use their new “News Feed” mode, which wasn’t live, wasn’t in chronological order, and included only a few friends. There were outcries over this.

Alot of users quickly realized that they can change the view to the “Live Feed” mode, and this solved alot of users issues. However over time many have realized that this view does not include everybody on their friends list. Some users have remedied this by switching to the “Status Updates” page, but this page is not an ideal solution, since it does not include applications, links, videos, etc…

Here’s a detailed guide on how to change that Live Feed view to include EVERYBODY on your friends list, essentially turning it back into what Facebook was like before all this nonsense.

1. Be sure you’re starting off in the News Feed view, if you’re not there yet, please go there now.

2. From here, try scrolling to the bottom until you get the option to load older stories, on the right of the link to load older stories, you should see a button called “Edit Options”? DON’T CLICK IT, we’re just checking to see if it’s THERE… IF YOU HAVE IT, proceed to step 4.

3. For those of you without the Edit Options button, you have to hide somebody/something (person or application) from your news feed. Find an application you don’t care about (like Farmville…) and hover over that news story, on the right of it, you should see a Hide option pop up. PS, if you really care about this person/application, you can always un-hide it after these steps…

4. Once you see the Edit Options button, scroll all the way back to the top, and click on the “View Live Feed” button.

5. Scroll to the bottom and click on the Edit Options button.

6. Change the number of friends to 9999 (or whatever your preference is) and save it.

7. Refresh Facebook, and be sure you’re on the Live Feed view, and everything should be up to par with what you’d expect.

OPTIONAL – 8. This is entirely optional, and only for those who had to hide something they want to still see. Go back to the NEWS FEED view, and go to edit options, here you have the ability to add them back to the feeds. Save, and switch back to live feed and you’re done.

Facebook Connect is an amazing system. Most internet uses at least have heard of Facebook, if not have their own account. More and more sites are supporting their new Facebook Connect system, which will entice even more users to sign up for Facebook, and in turn they already have accounts on multiple other sites, such as Digg, Stickam, and LifeHacker, and now that includes Tech Jawa.

I’m sure alot of users don’t see the point, but as quick as this system is growing, its great to get ahead of the game and be prepared for anybody who visits this blog with Facebook, instantly has commenter access, with avatar and links back to their Facebook accounts.

An amazing thing about this system is it also has the ability to post to your news feed as shown below.

That’s right, Tech Jawa comments straight to your Facebook news feed. This helps you update your Facebook, and in turn gets more users involved in your discussion.

So to begin using this system, all you have to do is use the FBConnect button, convinently located in the sidebar, and in the comments section. You’ll be asked to grant access to your Facebook account and once you do so you’re automatically logged into this site with posting access. As long as you remain logged into Facebook, you also remain logged into Tech Jawa.

Be sure to look for the friendly Facebook Connect button on other sites, as more and more are starting to utilize the system. It allows for a “one account and password to rule them all” concept, and works wonderfully, especially for sites which you might not to spend time creating an account and logging in for a trivial matter, like commenting.

Well I want to start off by saying this is my first review of anything, I thought it would be good to do it on something I just recently discovered! So here it goes!

So I’ve never actually thought twitter could be useful, until today.

Having Twitter integrate so seamlessly into my blog works wonderfully! (See right hand column for what I’m talking about!)

I’ve also integrated Twitter into my Facebook account, via the application TwitterSync. I chose this application, because the standard “official” Twitter syncing application keeps updating your status as “is twittering:” followed by your real status update, which gets QUITE annoying, to ones self, and their friends.

I’ve tried using the MySpace application by the same name (different author) but it’s intentions are different, it takes your current MySpace status, and syncs it to Twitter, which isn’t my preference, I would rather go to Twitter, type in ONE status update, and have all my social networking sites update with the same status, until somebody codes a MySpace application that does what the Facebook one does, I think I’ll be leaving my MySpace status as blank for a while, it is to much of a pain to update it separately.

Overall, I really love the idea of Twitter, and it can be turned into quite a powerful tool, especially for bloggers like myself!

If anybody is curious, the Twitter updates I have on the right hand side of my blog, is direct code from Twitter, it is NOT a plugin or widget for WordPress (what my blog is powered by) which makes it even more exciting!