Facebook offers Jabber, MSN redundant?

Let’s face it. The only reason people use MSN is because, everyone else uses MSN. Everyone also uses Facebook – in fact arguably, more people use Facebook than MSN.

This week, Facebook started offering Facebook Chat over Jabber. What does this mean? This means that you can use Adium (OSX), Pidgin (Windows) or even iChat (OSX again) to talk to your Facebook buddies. There is no longer any need to log into Facebook and chat in your web browser or use the bloated MSN client from hell. As a point, I haven’t used the official client in years, Adium offers it perfectly well.

Either way, I’ve been using it for a few days now. It’s much more stable than they hacky approach that had been taken before and means that communication tends to be a lot smoother. It’s refreshingly cool.

So a call to everyone, stop using MSN. It’s bloated, horrid, ad/spam ridden (especially on Windows). Uninstall it, leave it alone – the friends you have on MSN are highly likely your friends on Facebook already. Let’s get this non-standard, horrid closed system outta here!

If you want details on how to do this, Facebook has a page on their site detailing how to set up the various IM clients out there.

I also just realised… this is my first truly opinionated blog post! Scary.