How-to: Get Facebook Chat in iChat

Many of us use Facebook, and have probably noticed that there is a chat function. Also, man of us use AIM in iChat. Personally, there are always more people on facebook than on AIM, so I can chat with a ot more people. Here’s how to integrate it with iChat so you don’t have to login to facebook every time you want to chat with someone or let someone else chat with you.

Luckily, Facebook recently launched their Jabber thingy, which has done well.

In iChat, click in the menubar iChat>Preferences. Then click accounts, where you should get a tab like this.

The Accounts preferences is shown here.

Now, just click the little + in the bottom left, and you are shown this screen.

For account type, select Jabber.

For the Account Name, you need to find some info.

Login to facebook.com and click on profile in the top right. It should go to your profile page with wall postings and your profile picture. Next, look in the URL bar of the browser. It should say http://facebook.com/user.

What is says where user should be is what you put in front of @chat.facebook.com. So for this example, the Account Name would be user@chat.facebook.com.

Your password is your password that you use to login to facebook all 5 times a day.

Now click done and wait. The new buddy window will appear, but it will say connecting. It may take a while for it to connect, and times may vary. for me it took about 45 seconds, others about 5. Whatever, but it still works!

After is connects, you will see all of your online facebook friends. Double-click a friend that has a green dot next to it and start chattin it up!



Proteus

You may remember this post where i mentioned that iChat is great. But, it in fact as I said, doesn’t support Yahoo! which I now really need. So I turn to Adium, but the interface just bothers me. Why? I really have no idea. But, I lived with it, and one day it refused to connect to Yahoo!. Below is a list of the only good multi-protocol IM clients for Mac.
Adium
Fire
Instandbird
Proteus

So Adium won’t connect to Yahoo!. Off the list.
Fire as discontinued development, and I don’t want an updateless application.
Instantbird is a little too purist, with contact list, chat.
Hmm Proteus? Never tried it.

Wow. It connects to everything. It looks great. It operates great. The interface is nice. And best of all, the dock icon rocks. And I think I know why I didn’t like Adium–there was always a bird watching me a flapping it’s wings when I got a new message. Luckily, with proteus when I get a new message, the dock icon just bounces.

Proteus is the one IM application for Mac that I can live with. Yes, there is Pidgin, but that requires using the fin library and X11 (which trust me, don’t even try). The interface is simple, it connects to everything, it has options.

So Proteus is changing some of their sites, so the links to get extra stuff are all broken. I’m sure that will be fixed in the future, but the interface is still amazing, simple and functional. That’s why I like this more than the others: No flapping ducks, simple and easy but customizable interface, frequent updates, and connects to everything no problem. And that’s why it’s better than Adium, Instandbird, and fire.

Download
Homepage

iChat

I recently started to use Adium, which was yahoo, google, and everything else known to man. But I am always interested in all of Apple’s computer products, And iChat I had tried and was not satisfied. I have a yahoo, google, and facebook IMs, and iChat only worked with AIM. So I used Adium. Then I was looking at pictures of the OS X desktop, and I saw the iChat icon in the dock. So I gave iChat another chance. I opened iChat and put in my AIM, and I was like, Okay. This works. then, I saw what other accounts I could use. I saw a Google Chat account, and I put that in. It calls it the Jabber list because that is what it uses to connect the gmail with iChat. Then, I got an iChat account, and that was awesome. It is called an Apple ID, which apparently when browsing the Apple Store your checkout will already have the info from your Apple ID put into the info. it gives you a _@mac.com username, but sadly you cannot use that as an actual email address.  I haven’t met anyone with an iChat account, but when I do I think it will come in handy. Sadly it doesn’t work with Yahoo! IM, but most of the people I know that have yahoo IMs also have AIM IMs.

The UI is very nice, and I really like the chat interface. The buddy list interface is also nice. I like using it with the spaces function so I can assign it to all of my spaces so when I switch spaces my conversation will come with me. I don’t usually like to keep my buddy list open when switching spaces, so I can just press the X button or do a Command+H, and keep my chat windows open.
I think that iChat is a great IM application, and you can be reassured with compatibility with OS X because all macs come with it.
Use iChat if you have an AIM or Google account that you want to take care of chat capabilities.