communication

Remember Pidgin?  Yes, it’s that one program I use to rule all my chat networks.  People have asked me how to use it for Facebook chat so here’re the steps to setup your Pidgin for Facebook’s chat.

Facebook:

1.  Login and go to Account / Account Settings and setup your username if you haven’t done so yet.

2.  Then go to Account / Edit Friends and sort all your contacts into their own lists.  This is required as Pidgin can’t recognize your friends who do not belong to any list.  They can open a chat with you but you can’t see when they come online.

That’s it for the Facebook part.  Now you can logout of Facebook and open up Pidgin.

1.  Go to Accounts / Manage Accounts and click on Add…

2.  Select XMPP as your protocol and fill in your Facebook username and the domain.

3.  Check the Advanced and Proxy tabs to match the screenshots below.

4.  Click Save and you’re done.

Wasn’t that easy?  Now you can chat with your Facebook friends without even consuming browser resources! 

I’ve been using the internet since 1991.  Started with dial-up and moved up from there.  One of the consequences of this is I’ve gathered quite a bit of logins for chat networks or Instant Messaging.  I started off with ICQ and got hooked.  Then my brother moved to Paris and we switched to Yahoo! Messenger.  We stayed with Y!M for so many years because it was convenient and had a lot of features.  Eventually, 80% of my friends were using Y!M and until today, that’s where they login.

Then Google introduced GMail with Google Talk built right in.  Of course, I found it better and one of my brothers who also moved abroad wants us to use it for our communication.  I was cool with it.  Until the brother who started me using Y!M switched to MSN Messenger because most of his colleagues have switched to that network.

And then there’s a friend of mine who pushed, cajoled, bullied and convinced me to create a Facebook account.  As we all know, Facebook has its own chat protocol.  So yet another chat network to login to.  Not to mention the other fringe networks I still use, AIM and IRC.

One can easily see that my meager system resources would be kaput before I even get to open a browser just so I can monitor all the chat networks I use.  Here’s where Pidgin comes in.  It’s an opensource program that allows me to login to all the mentioned chat networks at once.  It supports…

* AIM
* Bonjour
* Gadu-Gadu
* Google Talk
* Groupwise
* ICQ
* IRC
* MSN
* MySpaceIM
* QQ
* SILC
* SIMPLE
* Sametime
* XMPP
* Yahoo!
* Zephyr

In case you’re wondering, Facebook uses the XMPP protocol for its chat services so, yes, Pidgin supports Facebook chat, too.  Cool, isn’t it?  The only network that Pidgin doesn’t support is Skype and I have that installed, too.  Anytime someone wants to talk to me and maybe also videochat, I launch Skype.  If not, then Pidgin is the only one I have open.

Download Pidgin here.  Install it and let me know if it doesn’t simplify your online communications.