If you’re like me, you use every instant messaging network that exists, with the exception of Skype, and connect to them all via a single slick third-party interface like Adium. I’ve sung the praises of Adium before – when it reached a 1.0 release, when I was curious about whether a Windows version existed and when I pointed out the main problem with Google Wave – though I’ve actually been using it since around 2005.
One thing that’s pissed me off dreadfully for the past half a year or so has been the broken Facebook chat issue. In brief: Adium used to support Facebook chat. It was buggy and unstable, but it worked, and there was even some decent integration – clicking to get info on a contact would bring you to the person’s Facebook page. This all stopped working in October or November 2010 when Facebook updated its chat thing, making the Adium connection to Facebook really sucky (I could connect, but contacts wouldn’t appear in my list until they messaged me). Since then, I’ve been connecting to Facebook chat via Jabber in Adium, but it’s never felt right.
Now that’s all fixed in Adium version 1.4.3b1. Adium support for Facebook chat is now built in!
Here’s the notification of the new version:
Facebook chat for Adium now uses the regular Facebook authentication system:
But it’s not entirely regular. Facebook texted me a one-time password to access it in Adium for the first time.
Then when I tried to sign in a second time, I got this screen:
So evidently the login stuff has to be gotten in order. I suppose it might have to do with the fact that I received a one-time password and tried to sign in more than one time. Or it could just be a buggy, unfinished setup. I’ll expect another release to follow 1.4.3b1 very shortly.
Why I don’t use skype for text chat: Skype doesn’t play nice with Adium. In order to use the Skype plugin for Adium, the Skype application actually has to be running at the time. This makes it useless to use Skype with Adium. Since I’m not interested in using more than one chat client, I don’t use Skype for chat.
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I was wondering whether FB felt this would be to their advantage or not. I guess I’ll have to check now whether Trillian will add FB.
BTW, I don’t really like Trillian, and miss Adium. I’ll have to check out whether there’s Adium for Windows (which I also hate, but that’s what I could afford.)
I was wondering whether FB felt this would be to their advantage or not. I guess I’ll have to check now whether Trillian will add FB.
It is to Facebook’s advantage to get everyone using their chat. Of course they’d prefer everyone to use their chat on their site in the short run, so they can make people look at their advertisements, but in the long run the way to achieve that is by having the best chat, that most of everyone’s contacts all use, that’s accessible in the most ways.
Perhaps in the future they’ll also release their own standalone desktop chat client. But I doubt it.
BTW, I don’t really like Trillian, and miss Adium. I’ll have to check out whether there’s Adium for Windows (which I also hate, but that’s what I could afford.)
There is. Adium was the Mac GAIM client. GAIM is now Pidgin. You should be able to run Pidgin on whatever computer you’ve got.
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