While I am more than ecstatic with my new Moto Droid, the one thing I want that it doesn’t currently offer is Facebook Chat. I’m sure many social butterflies in Android land feel the same. Well, there’s some good news. Ok, being new to the Android scene I made a newbie mistake. Facebook Chat is supported with Meebo. I’ve been using Meebo since yesterday on my Droid and like it overall. It could use some tweaking for the Droid’s higher res screen but other than that it’s golden. And of course, I have my FB chat. Now, the original, bigger news is that Facebook is this close to releasing FB’s connection interface to the XMPP protocol (an open XML-based protoco) that would effectively allow other chat/multi-chat programs to tap into FB Chat’s services. CEO Michael Raymond of instant messaging software developer “ProcessOne” stated that a recent scouring of the internet by their software bot had found the XMPP software stack hiding within chat.facebook.com

In plain english — it would allow services such as Google Talk to glean your Facebook friends and integrate them into one unified window and service bringing a more seamless experience to end users. On my BlackBerry and iPhone I used Beejive which is by far the best multi-chat app. Beejive has support for Facebook Chat as does a couple other multi-chat apps. Android however is alone for now, void of any official support. With their new willingness to share via this common protocol means Google as well as many other IM providers will be able to integrate the social networking giant’s chat features into their own services. I can’t wait. Who else is looking forward to this new found friendship?

Newstine > Computer Buyer

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