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.
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Want to find out which of your friends are busy wasting their day away on Facebook? Unfortunately you’ll have to hold off on that as Facebook chat currently says that it’s “down for maintenance”. The issues, which began appearing earlier in the day, appeared to be related to the service becoming unreliable. Users would visit a page only to notice that the chat service was no longer functioning properly.
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Want to call your Facebook friends via video chat? Soon enough you’ll be able to. Earlier today one of our readers sent us a link to one of Facebook’s cached JavaScript files which reveals a number of clues as to a soon to be released video chat service. There’s no way to mistake the code which is still currently accessible. There are actual notification messages including “Waiting for your friend…”, “Video call denied.”, “Incoming call:”, and “Loading video call…”
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Facebook’s chat service has become one of the most used features on the site but for many the service has become little more than an annoyance. The problem being that once you appear online, you would be regularly contacted by people that you don’t know or don’t care to chat with. While you may not want to chat at that moment, it’s nice to have the ability to see who’s currently online.

Thanks to a couple of new features within the chat service, it should no longer be annoying. There is now the ability to filter your friends based on your friend lists and you can even create friend lists from within the chat application. Having users displayed within friend lists is also an optional feature. The most important feature is the ability to control which friends see you online and which can’t.
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Today Facebook is announcing the launch of live chat integration for Facebook applications. It’s a simple integration but it could prove to be powerful for real-time applications. According to Facebook, “With the new fb:chat-invite tag, you can display a list of a user’s online friends and allow the user to invite a friend to chat. Like with the multi-friend selector, you can customize which friends should / shouldn’t appear in this list using the exclude-ids parameter.”

What this doesn’t provide is real-time chat with the application developers. Instead, it’s a way for applications to initiate chat among a user’s friends to encourage them to participate in whatever activity the application is encouraging. We’ve included a screenshot of the integration below which is from Playfish’s extremely popular Pet Society application.
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Just as we suspected, more scams have begun to arrive on Facebook. The latest have appeared via chat, where the scammer hacks into a friend’s account and initiates a chat conversation begging for money. The situation is always similar enough–they’re stranded in some foreign land and need money wired into their account so that they can get a return flight home.

While the channel for the scam is on the newer side, a little bit unsettling given its occurrence on Facebook, the scam’s motif is nothing new at all. And it’s Facebook’s response time that has many worried about the social network’s ability to readily handle the situation.
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Seth Sternberg, CEO of Meebo, posted a notice tonight that the company has been temporarily banned from accessing Facebook using their current protocol. The company added support at the end of December (approximately 3 weeks ago) and Facebook has since informed them that they must pull the plug. How would Facebook like them to access the chat system?
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