Today, Facebook announced XMPP support for Facebook Chat. This is big news, as this means that all XMPP enabled chat clients (including Pidgin) can now connect to Facebook with merely a few simple steps.
Doing so in Pidgin is quick and easy. To start, go to the add accounts menu. When adding an account, you should select the following values:
For the protocol type, select XMPP.
For the username, use your Facebook username. (see http://www.facebook.com/username/)
For the domain, use "chat.facebook.com"
For the password, use your Facebook password.
In advanced, do the following:
Uncheck Require SSL
Set connect port to 5222
Set connect server to chat.facebook.com
That's it! Hit save and you will be logged into Facebook chat.
For those of you who currently use the third party Facebook plugin, we strongly encourage you to switch to using the official Facebook XMPP protocol. The plugin is rife with minor problems and bugs due to how it attempts to use a number of undocumented protocols. Conversely, the XMPP implementation is official and fully supported, and will be far superior in the long run.
You can read the official Facebook blog post at http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=361
Enjoy!
(Post edited to include necessary advanced settings)
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This is neat and all, but I can't seem to get DIGEST-MD5 to actually work. Ultimately, pidgin runs out of mechs to try and I get back a 503 when pidgin falls back to iq:auth
ReplyDeleteYou'll need to use unsecured plain-text authorization, unfortunately. It's probably the one downside to all this.
ReplyDeleteThis should be able to work with Empathy then too, correct? I'm unable to connect and I imagine there's something in your "Advanced" tab that I'm missing.
ReplyDelete@Jay:
ReplyDeleteIt works with empathy: in the account window: add > add new jabber account; reuse an existing account > create > login id: username@chat.facebook.com; advanced: encryption required *not* selected.
I've updated the post to mention that secure connections should be disabled. Thanks for the comments all.
ReplyDelete"Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams" should be unchecked, meaning the insecure plaintext method is not used (though it's still unencrypted).
ReplyDeleteYour line "In advanced, make sure security options are off (no SSL, plaintext authentication)." seems to imply that plaintext is *on*.
Excellent. Just excellent. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteWhen I uncheck "allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams" it then prompts me to say it needs to be allowed, so I say yeah. Then I get a 503: service unavailable.
ReplyDeleteDo you need to specify "Home" as a resource like in your example? It's not working for me either in Pidgin or Empathy... maybe FB is having some growing pains with their chat servers...
ReplyDeleteI'm getting a 503 error... maybe Facebook is feeling the slashdot effect :P
ReplyDeleteAlso getting 503 error all day long. Is this something on facebooks end we just need to wait out?
ReplyDeleteWorks for me. Thank you for the heads up!
ReplyDeleteDo you know if they will be adding SSL/TLS support?
I will absolutely not be switching until encrypted login is a reality.
ReplyDeleteError 503 here too using pidgin 2.6.5-1 under arch
ReplyDelete503 here in norway ...
ReplyDelete503 in Spain too... :-(
ReplyDeleteAt last! WOW :)
ReplyDeletesorry...but what is my username?????
ReplyDeleteif my name is alen boksic...:)))...so...my username is alen boksic???surely not...
email????id that fb assign to me????
helpppppppppppppppppp!!!!!
503 in Ireland...
ReplyDelete503 in Indonesia...
ReplyDelete503 in Australia too.
ReplyDeleteYou can find your username out by logging into Facebook and clicking on Account in the top right hand side of the page. Then you can see/edit your username. If you have been a member of Facebook for ages like me you might not even have a username and you can choose one on that page.
503 to me too (Israel). in the other hand to a friend using Adium (Mac OS X) it did work.
ReplyDeletemy guess is that it's not something with Facebook but with Pidgin, or it's something user specific...
503 in France... Pidgin 2.6.4 and Empathy 2.28.1
ReplyDelete503 in autria
ReplyDeletehttp://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php
ReplyDelete503 in Colombia, pidgin 2.6.5
ReplyDelete503 in Italy with Pidgin 2.6.5 on 64bit Arch Linux.
ReplyDeleteIt works perfectly using Empathy or Kopete.
For those of you an arch, you have to install cyrus-sasl. Just figured this out. I'm sure there's a similar package for other Linux distros...
ReplyDeleteI was getting 503 error messages. Then I went to the link Fred Morcos posted (http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php), I followed the steps explained there and now I'm loged in :)
ReplyDelete503 also :(
ReplyDeleteIt looks like you need to set the "connect server" to "chat.facebook.com" (on the second page) and possible you need to set "resource" to "Pidgin". I also installed cyrus-sasl like mentioned above, I don't know if it was related.
ReplyDeleteI've updated the post with some additional settings, which some commenters have alluded to.
ReplyDeleteIn practice, it seems like login is a bit shaky- sometimes I have to press connect several times before it succeeds.
Thanks for the tips everyone.
Arch Linux user here. Install cyrus-sasl solved the 503 error message for me too, thanks for the tip guys. Now I'm logged in. :)
ReplyDeleteI can confirm on Arch Linux that installing cyrus-sasl did the trick :D
ReplyDeleteAfter changing Home to Pidgin + adding a local alias it works for me! Before that i got 503..
ReplyDeleteExcellent! I've been wanting this for ages.
ReplyDeleteWindows Users:
ReplyDeleteAfter constantly getting the 503 error, and double checking settings I deleted the account and re-added it. Though all the settings were the same, re-adding the account seemed to do the trick.
Link to page with the exact settings.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=779#!/help/?faq=16739
I didn't change anything and finally it works. I suspect facebook changed something on their end.
ReplyDeleteSome users have no name, they have u_(Facebook_ID)@chat.facebook.com, someone knows the reason?
ReplyDeleteFacebook says that you should also add chat.facebook.com to the connect server in the advanced settings. The 503 error went away after I did that. See the link people posted earlier: http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php
ReplyDeleteI've just set this up, and got it working, using your instructions, which are generally fine, but I think still need a bit of clarification:
ReplyDeleteAs has already been mentioned, your Facebook username must be the actual username you created (and if you haven't yet, you'll need to create one). You can't use an email address (as you can when logging into FB via your browser).
On the "Basic" tab, do you need to put "Home" in the resource field? It's shown in the screenshot but not mentioned explicitly in the instructions.
On the "Advanced" tab it looks like you need to remove the default "proxy.jabber.org" from the File transfer proxies field. The screenshot is confusing because it shows this still in place but doesn't show "chat.facebook.com" in the Connect server field (which you DO need).
Regards
Nick
I'm still getting 503 and I've told it to both not allow plain text authentication as well as do allow it. I have a separate "Proxy" tab which has no selection for GNOME Proxy settings. The "proxy.eu.jabber.org" shows up again when I go back into account settings even though I deleted it. Any ideas?
ReplyDeleteFacebook chat seems to have been having major problems today. Earlier I was getting warnings about plaintext authentication via an encrypted connection, too, where everything had been working fine until then.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I have a separate Proxy tab and no Gnome. My proxy tab says "Use Global Proxy Settings" which seems sensible and works.
You're right about the "proxy.eu.jabber.org" in the File transfer proxies field. I, too, deleted it and I see it's back.