Just a day ago we heard of Facebook and AOL partnering together in AOL’s instant messaging platform, AIM. Taking it a step further, facebook chat has now been made available everywhere, including the desktop applications.

You may now integrate the Facebook chat in any of your favorite instant chat messenger you use and stay connected with your friends even off the Facebook page. All this has been made possible by the implementation of the Jabber XMPP protocol, an open messaging protocol that is supported by most instant messaging softwares, including iChat, Pidgin, Adium, Miranda and Google Talk as well.

So how does it work? The process is very simple. All you need to do is simply connect your Facebook account with the instant messaging client on your desktop and you are ready to go. You can then chat with your friends without logging into the facebook account. One missing feature is that you may not be able to create a separate friend list from your desktop client and would have to get back to your Facebook account to do so.

Facebook has also built the support for Facebook Chat into Facebook Connect, so that the developers who wish to build chat experiences into their websites, desktop or mobile instant-messaging applications and services.

Well having the chat functionality from 2 years, I feel Facebook has bought this feature pretty late. Also I would love if I can actually do lot more from the desktop client like posting status updates onto the profile. But I’l do with what is offered at present and hope Facebook will soon enhance this feature in time to come.

News source: Facebook Blog

Image source: rtpi.org