How to enable Facebook Chat in Pidgin

Written on March 11th, 2010 at 02:08 am by shredder12

I am an Instant messaging addict. Its the fastest way I can contact with most of my friends and work mates. Many of my facebook friends are not available on gtalk and I never wanted a separate tab for facbeook chat. The only solution I liked was to somehow integrate FB chat in Pidgin. I used the Facebook chat plugin but that didn't work for me. Thanks to FB developers who added XMPP/Jabber support for Facebook chat and now we can easily enable FB chat in Pidgin.

I am assuming that Pidgin is already installed. Just follow the steps below to enable Facebook chat in Pidgin.

Open Pidgin. Go to Accounts -> Manage accounts and select Add user.

Now, select XMPP protocol from the drop down menu, enter your facebook username in the "username" field and chat.facebook.com in the domain field.

And now, click the advanced tab in the same window, uncheck Require SSL/TLS field and enter chat.facebook.com in the connect server field.

Now, click save and the new account will be created. Pidgin will automatically try to connect using that account, if its enabled. If everything goes right, you will be prompted for a password, ofcourse if you haven't already done that while creating the account.