While Facebook announced in May of last year that they would be launching XMPP support for Facebook Chat, the launch hasn’t taken place yet. There have been a few services, including Meebo, that have been working with Facebook to test out external support of Facebook’s chat service however XMPP support is still not live. That may all change shortly according to process one who suggested earlier today that the launch of Facebook’s chat XMPP connection interface is imminent.

So what the hell is XMPP? If you aren’t a developer you probably have no idea. Ultimately XMPP is a messaging protocol based on XML. It’s simply a standard which enables two parties to relay chat messages between each other. XMPP has given rise to a surge in third-party chat software like Adium, Digsby, and many others. While not all chat providers (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc) provide support for XMPP, it is quickly becoming the most widely used standard.

If you aren’t into geeking out about communications protocols, all you need to know is this: Facebook chat could soon be available on your favorite instant messaging client. While there have been few updates (if any) from Facebook about the launch of Facebook Chat support for third-party developers since last May, there are many who have been anticipating the launch. Over the past few days though Facebook Chat has experienced a number of problems, even resulting in a short period of downtime for the service.

It’s unknown what the cause of these issues were, but we hope that it means Facebook will soon release more details about how developers can implement full Facebook Chat functionality in their own applications.