Facebook, everyone's favorite social networking site, is packed with a smorgasbord of features, of which one of the more useful is Facebook Chat. In its vanilla form it appears as a little Ajax applet at the bottom of the screen, allowing communication with any friends of yours who are online. This works great but with one obvious limitation: you have to have Facebook active in your web browser, which can obviously be quite cumbersome when you're doing other things or have tons of other webpages open.
Well, it's actually possible to use Facebook Chat without Facebook, thanks to a nifty plugin for the IM client Pidgin. Thanks to the multi-protocol nature of Pidgin, I can have my Facebook Chat friends coexisting with my AIM buddies:
names + profile pics blurred for privacy purposes...
Profile pics, status messages, profile data...it's all there. This appears to be a very polished plugin, and is great news for users of both Facebook + Pidgin.
Hit the link below for the plugin's project page and directions to download + install:
http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/
No comments:
Post a Comment