Facebook Chat Escapes the Walled Garden
Mark Hendrickson
46 comments »

When Facebook officially unveiled its plans for Facebook Chat in March, many accused the company of creating yet another walled garden. The company’s proprietary chat protocol was not Jabber/XMPP-compliant, it didn’t incorporate other IM services like AIM and MSN onsite, and no APIs were provided for developers.
Nonetheless Digsby, a multiprotocol desktop client like Trillian and Adium but with more social network integrations, has figured out a way to incorporate Facebook Chat. Digsby users can now chat with their Facebook friends alongside their AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber contacts. And they don’t even have to visit Facebook to do so.





Still no mac client though… sighhh…
I’m hoping this doesn’t mean you’d have to type in your Facebook credentials in their piece of software…
@Cyril - yes, yes it does
Who cares? This will get absolutely no traction. Google Talk is comparably a juggernaut to Facebook, and it’s a drop in the piss bucket compared to AIM, Y! Messenger or Live.
so are people going to abandon their AIM, Google Talk, etc accounts? people don’t need to chat with their friends on multiple services, right??
i have this little hunch that facebook might be trying to take over the world.
Doesn’t work for me… too bad, I really wanted to try it!
But you can’t use Facebook chat to speak to someone on another protocol. How is this no longer a walled garden?
Won’t this make it even harder for Facebook to turn a profit?
Still waiting for a Mac client….
hi hi I’m wondering if Facebook likes thaht kind of opening, If yes it means the overall strategy is changing … why ?
Hey Mark, by Trillium I think you mean Trillian or is there another IM client called Trillium
I would consider using this…
While I don’t see this IM taking over the ohers I’ve found it very useful lately.
Also, if you play and games in facebook apps its nice and easy to see who is online and ask if they want a game.
Still kinda a walled garden since you need to login to facebook and it can’t be used with anything else…
Facebook are going for lock in. Are they to the web as Microsoft is to the desktop?
does it violate any TOS?
There is a Mac client now: Gabtastik
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9933456-2.html
http://www.gabtastik.com/Gabtastik.html
oops - I guess Digsby does have a mac client
(my bad)
C&D in 5, 4, 3, 2…
Digsby doesn’t have a mac client. it’s “coming soon” whatever that means.
I know that I for one dont have even a quarter of my facebook friends in my MSN/Skype contact list.. so yes i think Facebook IM has huge potential, at least when and if they release API’s and a client side app (adobe air?).
Props to Digsby for making it happen, regardless of whether you use it or not.
Also, I’m glad Digsby finally got a mention here.
Sounds like a TOS violation to me. Next thing we’ll hear is how Scoble’s account got frozen.
I don’t know if I can trust this service.
I just tried Digsby and added my facebook account. Went online and everything is fine.
Then edit your account setting and change your password to a fake password and try connecting again. It still works. Does that mean Digsby store’s all my passwords? Even so they are’nt updating it anyway.
go RIT graduates!
Addition to Comment # 22
Even if you delete the facebook and add it again with a fake password, it works. So does that mean, even if you remove an account they still store it?
I just went and changed my password on facebook ..
C & D ….. coming coming … !!!
francisyeboah60.media-toolbar.com
Isn’t this against Facebook TOS? I seem to remember myself getting in trouble for “running [automated] scripts[/code] against [their] services”"
ffs how many IM clients do we need
i need
I liked digby, but i wasn’t able to drag my ICQ contacts from one group to another… Have an impression it’s badly coded.
We need 1, and that would be Digsby. It’s pretty sweet. Only now, I have like 300+ friends online 24/7
@Gleb I combined two of my groups by renaming the 2nd group to the name I wanted to move them to, and got some error and they were combined.
Yawn. Facebook is so yesterday. Twitter is dead. How about companies that have a real business model? People who sell something and not sell advertising?
@ 24
I sent the error to the folks at digsby and quite quickly Steve in support responded back to let me know that they were working on that, something is haveing an issue updating.
Just wanted to mention that I’ve been using Digsby for about five minutes and am already wondering how I ever coped without it.
wow, seems like the astroturfing from Digsby (ya dig?!?!!!) employees is high here. i finally know what those stupid ads are on the side of the garbage cans in Midtown. yay. YA DIG?!?!?!
I use Digsby and it’s good. I have it on Vista and XP and works well. I am waiting for the Mac client now but I don’t know if it will be able to replace Adium for me or not.
You have to create a Digsby account which scares some people but basically you do that so it keeps all your settings so they are kept whatever computer you go to to use it, pretty slick. So you fonts, your skin, your sounds, all that should carry from computer to computer by just logging in.
Wait, so who has Soc paper? has their away message?
I just downloaded digsby and it’s pretty sick for facebook IM. Plus its nice to have my AIM account on there too. Does anyone know if this is against the TOS?
They’ll only block your account if they can detect you’re not using your web browser
Ahhhh, somebody port this to Linux, PLEASE!
If you guys think this is cool. Wait till Jumii.com opens up. Jumii connects all of your social networks (like Mebo does for IM) so you can read and send messages, comments, bulletins, pics and more accross your networks all from one place.
facebook chat api: http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2.....-chat-api/
the latest adium nightly build does this too now…. http://tinyurl.com/6zpk8r