Rather old tech news, but interesting none the less; Facebook chat has expanded its reach, and has been available for use outside of the traditional Internet Browser since late February. With an estimated 2 million chat messages transferred between users across the Facebook network each and every day, this development is an important step towards improving communication between users, putting Facebook Chat on par with the likes of Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! IM.
Facebook users can now configure some of their favorite chat clients (including Pidgin and iChat) in a fashion that will allow them to communicate with Facebook users, without being logged into the website via their browser. Pretty neat, huh. Facebook appear to have implemented this by converting the chat stream to the Jabber format, as demonstrated below;
- Jabber ID - <facebookusername>@chat.facebook.com
- Password - <your Facebook password>
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The tech chaps over at Facebook HQ also mentioned ‘Project Titan’ back in February, which if it materialises will provide each Facebook user with an email account in the format of; <chosenfacebookusername>@facebook.com.
Theoretically, this could do away with the need to provide a Jabber ID for Instant Message communication, as users who wish to chat outside of Facebook itself could associate their Facebook email address with an alternative IM client; e.g. Windows Live.
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The potential to unveil an email account tied into your Facebook account could increase Facebook’s influence ten fold, allowing users to associate their Facebook Accounts with all manner of other online services. Whether this is a viable business venture or still a pipe-dream is not currently clear, but it seems more than likely that some big news surrounding this issue will be announced within the next couple of months.
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