Pidgin joins Adium, Digsby in supporting Facebook Chat

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Freeware, Social Software, web 2.0

Pidgin joins Adium, Digsby in supporting Facebook Chat

by Danny Mendez Jun 19th 2008

Pidgin doesn't officially support Facebook Chat (yet?), but it can be customized with useful add-ons like the new Facebook Chat plug-in. Once installed, the plug-in allows Pidgin to log-in to a Facebook account, pull the buddy-list, and send/receive messages.

Adium, arguably Pidgin's counterpart on Mac, also received support for Facebook Chat in the recent 1.3 beta release, though, the feature is absent from the most recent official update. If you're a risk-taker who enjoys putting his/her computer in jeopardy for the sake of testing new software, give it a shot.

We've also covered a couple of other methods of taking Facebook Chat outside the site:

There's a Firefox plug-in that adds the social-network's IM service to a sidebar.
The social software/service one-stop-shop known as Digsby also added support for Facebook Chat earlier this year.

[via Lifehacker]

Tags: adium, chat, facebook, IM, instant message, InstantMessage, pidgin

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Josh said 12:06PM on 6-19-2008

Firefox sidebar chat is hardly a plugin. It's a bookmark that opens in the sidebar. =\

moby said 1:33PM on 6-19-2008

Do you test these before you recommend them? The windows add on for Pidgin is unstable and crashing the program.

Danny Mendez said 4:20PM on 6-19-2008

Unfortunately, I haven't tested the Pidgin add-on. I was just reporting that it's available, and I've heard enough good feed back to recommend it for a test-drive -- if you're interested in testing it out. I have tested Facebook Chat in Adium, though, it works well enough. It's nothing impressive.

If you're having problems with Facebook chat in Pidgin, I recommend you uninstall it since some users seem to have problems with it. If you're interested in testing a future version, we recommend keeping an eye on the program's Google page.

"Firefox sidebar chat is hardly a plugin. It's a bookmark that opens in the sidebar. =\"

And Josh is right, the firefox plug-in for Facebook chat is actually more of a hack. Sorry for calling it a plug-in =\

zmnatz said 10:49AM on 7-08-2008

I've been using the Facebook plugin for pidgin since I first heard about it and pidgin has yet to crash for me.

DJ SKORRPII said 7:45AM on 7-04-2008

Adium Beta 1.36b supports facebook chat on MAC... But Only when user should be logged into facebook on his browser...

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