Thoughts on Facebook Chat
Monday, February 15, 2010 by darcoI was quite excited last Wednesday to discover that Facebook has finally delivered on their promise of exposing an XMPP client interface to their integrated chat system. After the initial euphoria wore off, I started to realize that there is still a lot of work to be done.
In terms of duplicating the chat experience that already exists via the Facebook website, the XMPP implementation they have set up does a wonderfully adequate job.
The problem is that the XMPP interface to Facebook Chat is really only a gateway. It is similar in concept to how XMPP transports allow you to use closed IM networks via XMPP, except they are exposing a client interface (C2S) instead of a server interface (S2S). While this approach is adequate for simple chat, it means that the only features supported are features that already exist in Facebook chat—which is pretty much bare bones chat.