How does one "FB Chat"? Have FaceBook, never chatted with it

Factual Questions
1

See title. There is a person who would like to communicate using FB Chat. I have a FaceBook account which I mostly ignore. I don’t find it particularly user-friendly. I’m on a Mac if that’s relevant here, 10.4.11 to be precise, and I have a wide selection of browsers installed to choose from if that matters.

I don’t see anything on the main page that I land on when I go to facebook.com and log in that says diddly about “chat” or “FB chat” or “Facebook Chat”.

2

When you open your facebook page, down in the bottom right of the screen will be a list of people currently online. If you click on any of them, you will open a small instant messenger window and you can IM away with them…

Right now, I’m sitting in Maryland chatting with Mum who is in the north of England via FB Chat.

3

There should be a small icon in the lower-right corner of your main user page that says “Chat” and has a little silhouette icon with a green or gray dot next to it. It works fine for me in Safari 5 under OSX 10.6, though I can’t recall if (or how well) it worked under 10.4 and whatever version of Safari that was.

The other option, BTW, is Adium. You can hook it up to log you into Facebook Chat and forget about the browser.* While you’re at it, you can consolidate your AIM, GChat, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Chat, and ICQ accounts into one stand-alone application. It’s great.

  • Well, almost forget about it — for reasons I don’t fully understand, once in a great while using Adium to log onto chat will trigger the “suspicious access” klaxons at FB Central and you’ll have to confirm your identity via the website. Usually this happens while I’m travelling.
4

You can also use iChat, although not necessarily iChat for tiger. It might be too old.

5

Have you figured this out yet? I’d be happy to show you how sometime, if you haven’t.

6

That sounds ominous.

7

I actually sat here for a good half hour trying to chat on FB. My kid had to tell me to hit the “enter” key to send. :smack:

8

Conway, we’re friends IRL! I was just offering to help. giggle

9

Yes…

a) allthegood is not the reincarnation of The Grapist but rather instead a person who seems to delight in making me deliriously happy. And she’s the first person I’ve successfully lured to the SDMB.

b) The person who wanted me to FB Chat was someone on OKCupid and she never filled out a profile, and always always wanted me to go off OKCupid and chat in some other software environment, so I think she was a scammer of some sort. We never did “FB Chat” after all, I think she found more cooperative targets.

c) I can’t ever get Adium to run on my computer. Dunno why but it just crashes the moment I launch it. I use Fire for multi-protocol chat. Which is not being kept up so it is out of date, unfortunately.

10

There’s Meebo, a web-based multi-protocol chat service. Nothing to download or update. It just remembers all your accounts. And everything you ever said. To anyone. And they’re not even owned by Google.

(I love making people feel safe about the services I recommend.)

11

Facebook uses XMPP (formerly known as Jabber), which is a standard, open chat protocol. Any XMPP-capable chat client can connect to the Facebook chat server; you’ll just need to specify its address, along with your Facebook account and password. Once you log in you’ll see all your friends who are online, and will be able to chat with them in the same way you normally would.