I’ve been meaning to post this for a while. About a month and a bit ago Facebook finally added support for XMPP. What does this mean? It means you can use Faceook Chat with any XMPP capable chat client.

I am using bitlbee, it was very easy to set up. Once you have a working bitlbee server (I will not discuss this here, it’s very easy!) this addline will add your Facebook account:

account add jabber USERNAME@chat.facebook.com PASSWORD

One problem is that all your friends will have nicknames similar to “u231523234″ where 231523234 is their unique ID. Assuming you are using irssi one way to get around this is t use this script.

wget -O ~/.irssi/scripts/bitlbee_rename.pl http://browsingtheinternet.com/temp/bitlbee_rename.txt
ln -s ~/.irssi/scripts/bitlbee_rename.pl ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/bitlbee_rename.pl

And then load it into irssi:

/script load bitlbee_rename.pl

Your contacts will be renamed when the join. Leave it for a few hours and eventually it will get everyone. Some names will not be accepted (if they are stupidly long for example). You can rename these people manually. Also, it won’t handle people with the same names.

Enjoy.