Facebook Chat, Making My Life More Complicated
When Facebook added the chat feature a few months ago, I found it to be entirely unnecessary. All the people with whom I wished to chat were already in my MSN, AIM, and GoogleTalk contact lists, which are all tied together by Pidgin.
(As an interesting and only slightly related aside, the Facebook chat was implemented on an open-source framework called Thrift developed in-house by Facebook engineers, and is in part written in Erlang. The developers’ notes on this are an interesting read.)
Unfortunately, I have since found a handful of Facebook friends who like to communicate using the chat feature, but not using conventional chat. I don’t usually keep a Facebook window open, so I don’t usually get to talk with them this way.
I had a similar problem a long time ago when Google first added chat to GMail. I don’t like using my browser to chat (because, among other reasons, a dedicated client is a lot better at it). As soon as I was able to add Google chat to Pidgin, though, I started using it daily.
Today, though I found a similar solution for my Facebook dilemma: a Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin. It is supposed to be able to integrate my Facebook chat buddies and status, among other things. Sounds great!
…except that it makes Pidgin segfault for me. Oops. Maybe after a few patches?
Update: How about a Pidgin plugin for Twitter? I would totally use Twitter if I didn’t have to go to a website to use it (I don’t have SMS on my phone).
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