People leaving AIM for Google Talk and Facebook?

Read Write Web has an interesting article on chat integration: Why IM Interoperability May Just be a Dream:

Interoperability between instant messaging (IM) clients is something a lot of users have wished for. More specifically, we wish it was standard and provided right out of the box instead of having to turn to third parties such as Adium, Digsby, Trillian, or Pidgin. Yet there seems to be a problem with the concept of interoperability for the companies of the more popular IM clients.

I'm wondering how much the interoperability really matters with the growth of XMPP services through Google and Facebook? I'm personally seeing more and more people who I used to chat with via AIM making themselves available through Google Talk. How about the rest of you, are you seeing your peeps move away from AIM? Maybe interoperability just doesn't matter because we finally have a critical mass of people using XMPP-based services.

The proprietary chat gig is up-- finally!

With Facebook's announcement that they are moving forward to enable cross-platform chat using XMPP/Jabber the chat wars are effectively over. With Facebook and Google on the XMPP. bandwagon it's just a matter of time until the proprietary services either switch or become totally irrelevant. It's about time this happened. This was the world's biggest no-brainer: Using Facebook Chat via Jabber.

Since the launch of Facebook Chat, we've received a lot of positive feedback from users about being able to connect instantly with their friends on Facebook. With Chat fully launched and growing steadily, we've started working on more new features to enhance the Chat experience.

Right now we're building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook.

Several new interesting Facebook things

Facebook has several new things you might find of interest. First is this beta Grazr Twitter widget that gives you an incredibly nice interface. It's way better than the standard Facebook Twitter application, and it can also be installed on your Netvibes, Pageflakes, and iGoogle pages:

The second item is also a new Twitter capability. You can now update your Facebook status directly from the Twitter client of your choice. application within Facebook. Wouldn't it be nice if Facebook allowed you to update your status from outside of Facebook from the client of your choice: e.g. Twitterific or even MoodBlast? Regardless, only having to update your status in one place is a positive. This is a huge deal as it is the first time that Facebook has allowed you to do something inside Facebook without having to be in Facebook. Progress!!! Before this will work you need to make some changes to enable this through the Twitter application in Facebook.

UPDATE: This has gone through several edits. Originally I had it written the way it reads now. I couldn't get it to work from outside, but it worked just fine from the Twitter application within Facebook. I tried several times. Well, it does indeed actually work. Perhaps there was some lag from so many people trying it out shortly after it was announced? Regardless, this is wonderful. Is this an early sign that Facebook might be willing to open-up?

The next item relates to rumors that there is a Facebook instant messaging application coming late this week. The biggest, and still unconfirmed part of this rumor is that the Facebook client is supposed to talk XMPP. This could be just what we need to bury forever the proprietary chat formats of AOL, MSM, and Yahoo. We desperately need a unified chat protocol, and if Facebook can help make this happen it's a positive. The new client is supposed to work completely in a browser, no client download, and even work outside of Facebook. Besides messaging, it is will have several features to allow you to manage other Facebook communications -- like updating your status. Finally, the application's release was delayed a week for no apparent reason? Could they be rushing to add the rumored Facebook groups before release? Makes total sense to me.

Finally, and this is not new, but I just wondered how many people were aware that there is a very capable XMPP chat application already in Facebook? Yep, there's a sweet GTalk implementation that you could be using right now. Here's a capture of me chatting with myself. Sweet!