Facebook Chat Escapes the Walled Garden

When Facebook officially unveiled its plans for Facebook Chat in March, many accused the company of creating yet another walled garden. The company’s proprietary chat protocol was not Jabber/XMPP-compliant, it didn’t incorporate other IM services like AIM and MSN onsite, and no APIs were provided for developers.

Nonetheless Digsby, a multiprotocol desktop client like Trillian and Adium but with more social network integrations, has figured out a way to incorporate Facebook Chat. Digsby users can now chat with their Facebook friends alongside their AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber contacts. And they don’t even have to visit Facebook to do so.