Howto: Add Your Facebook Friends to Pidgin (via The Linuxologist)

One of my readers (and friends) asked:

“Is there a way to retrieve your facebook chats somewhere on your computer?”

While I personally do not use the Facebook chat (or any chat, seriously. I just don’t have time), I don’t get questions from my readers very often so I thought I’d look into it.

Here is what I’ve found…

The Basics

Facebook chat — as it is when you are logged in to Facebook.com — is nothing more than an HTML/AJAX “chat”… I’m trying to keep this in as plain of terms as possible for the sake of time and to save you the headache of technical details (I assume if you could understand the technical stuff, you probably already know how it works ).

So basically the chat functions as part of the Facebook website and is maintained between your browser and the Facebook server. This means there is no external “Chat” or “IM” client to manage it.

What You Can’t Do

Facebook does not currently provide an Archiving feature for its website-contained chat. This means if you want to archive your chats you are basically out of luck. All you could really do at this point is manually copy/paste your chats into a text file for archiving — this is the manual way, very nasty!

What You Can Do

Facebook does provide access to the “Facebook Chat” outside of their actual website. However, they do not offer an official “Facebook Chat” Client/IM. The good news is there are free chat/IM clients out there for all operating systems and you can use Facebook Chat (through one of these clients) to chat with your Facebook friends outside of the actual Facebook website (and without a browser at that).

Assuming you choose a chat/IM client that allows archiving, you should be able to chat with your Facebook friends and automatically archive the chats through the client.

So HOW Do You Do It?

First, check out this page and look at the supported chat clients. Pidgin is cross-platform (you can use it on Windows/Mac/Linux) and is the one I would choose, but you do as you like. Pidgin allows archiving and also has plugins that allow you more control over the settings (for advanced users).

Once you have Pidgin (or whatever chat/IM client you chose), you need to setup the client to work with Facebook Chat. Each client is a little different, but here is a quick guide to setting it up with Pidgin.

Next you will need to turn on the archiving/logging features and adjust the settings. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Here’s a quick guide for doing that in Pidgin also.

Conclusion

While you can’t easily archive Facebook Chat from within the browser/website, you can use an external client for that purpose. It is fairly painless and if archiving your chats is important to you, this is your best option for now.

If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment below and I will try to help out as best I can.

Links (same as above, just verbose)

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=297991732130

http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php

http://www.pidgin.im/

http://www.bukisa.com/articles/331046_facebook-chat-a-complete-tutorial

http://www.ehow.com/how_5858426_archive-pidgin-instant-messenger.html

Well apparently there is a new Firefox extension out there, but not one you or I would want. Unfortunally, if you use Windows (and install Windows updates/security patches) you have been or will likely fall victim to a dirty Microsoft Trick!

That’s right, with the latest “Security” patch to the .Net framework, Windows secretly installs an extension in Firefox. Worse yet they disable the uninstall button so you cannot remove it (at least not without hacking the registry, which could be dangerous if you mess it up). The new extension opens up vulnerabilities that were not previously there and allows easy access for new (and unwanted) software to be installed on your machine!

Here’s a link to read up the details: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/05/microsoft_update_quietly_insta.html
My guess is Microsoft is secretly trying to sabbotage Firefox and make it equally or perhaps more vulnerable to security threats as Internet Explorer, but I have no proof, yet.

Looks like this is a great time to consider trying Ubuntu!

I’ll put up a guide soon for how to remove this headache of a stealthy trojan extension when I next boot into Windows (no promise on how soon that will be).