I wonder if this is really true. If Facebook was so interested in XMPP, why didn’t they start with that? Surely it’s easier to start with XMPP than to write something else and then create a gateway. Perhaps they had no intention of an open garden, but later relented after they saw the cat was out of the bag with several clients getting Facebook chat support so quickly. Maybe we have these client authors to thank for this announcement?

My point is that instead of starting to code without thinking, it would have been better for these projects to sustain user pressure on Facebook to adopt XMPP by ignoring the new walled garden, at least. If both Adium and Digsby would have ignored Facebook Chat, the pressure on Facebook from users who want to use Facebook Chat in their favorite standalone client would only have been stronger and thus it would have been even more important for Facebook to add XMPP support very fast to please their users. So, boycotting new walled garden networks is the way to go: these networks are all too small to push their own proprietary protocols and *all* popular instant messaging clients already support XMPP. If multi-protocol clients stay competing on which new walled garden networks they support, we will never get rid of them (the walled gardens, not these clients).

This is a real concern. I hope they aren’t so frustrated that they don’t bother making the new XMPP based Facebook chat nicely integrated. It would be terrible if people continued to use the proprietary protocol when an open one is available.

Well, I don’t think that will happen: who wants to maintain an inferior and duplicate interface? Only fools would do that and I’m sure the Adium/Digsby devs are no fools.

I think current transports lack in a lot of areas,

I will not deny that; but things can change

I have not seen an XMPP client that has as nice an implementation of transports and transport set up as the multi protocol clients have for their proprietary networks.

We worked on improving the integration of transports in Coccinella (and have more ideas!), maybe you should try our latest release. Feedback about how we can improve Coccinella in this regard is always welcome!