HI boys and girls.

As some of you may know, I much prefer the internal Nokia provided chat program over running secondary programs like Pidgin. Specifically, the integration of presence everywhere, including the Contacts app.

So, a while ago we saw Pidgin users get access to Facebook chat through the pidgin-facebookchat plugin (which can be found at http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/) and I wanted the same thing. I started working on this about two days ago and I wanted to show you all my current progress.


Contact app showing just people on the Facebook protocol.


Accounts dialog box


Presence system tray menu


Chatting through the Facebook protocol with my wife (ignore the timestamps, that's my fault)

At this point, I wouldn't consider this to be ready for release yet. The reason for this is because, as you can see in the above images, the Contacts app isn't actually showing if friends are online or not. Something about how I implemented this appears to have broken MSN in the same way.. still works, but status isn't shown.

When a chat starts, you'll get the standard incoming chat notification. It shows the Facebook profile number for the person instead of their name. This also happens at the start of the chat until about 30 seconds later, which you can also see in the pictures above.

Facebook notifications are supported by the plugin and are received by the tablet as shown by the syslog, however they aren't handled at this time. I'd imagine we could handle the notification the same way as a new incoming e-mail notification.

I would like to release this plugin as soon as the status issue for MSN and Facebook is fixed with the notifications being a secondary priority. I've reached out to Collabora, the guys behind RTCOMM, to see if they have advice or time to help me with these issues. I would appreciate any help from anyone that has knowledge of RTCOMM, telepathy and telepathy-haze so that we can polish this up and get it usable for one and all.

Sweet, that was the main reason I had to head back to pidgin!

that is really cool. Would be happy to beta-test

Though I do find that people think that i'm on facebook all the time. And get confused when I havent seen wall updates messages ect.

I've also started hacking away at MySpace IM this morning.

Fantastic! Another wannabe beta-tester here.

Likewise, would definitely be interested in Beta testing this.

this is perfect! Are you going to put this in extras as an update? I would love to use it. I didn't like pidgin and I am an avid rtcom user, but I miss the facebook option.

I'm unsure how I'll release it.. let me just finish it first.

sure I'll wait. Thanks

I got inspired.

I was up until 4am last night, compiling, tinkering and playing with some other protocols added to RTCOMM. Here's what I've worked on and their status.

Facebook Chat
- Works, allows sending/receiving of messages
- Does not show online/offline status for friends
- Friends shown are just recent friends online, just like the Facebook chat on the site doesn't show offline friends.
- Seems to cause the Contacts app to have trouble with status for other protocols, probably because of something missing or misconfigured on my part.

Twitter
- Works very well
- Opens a new chat window when you come online which shows all recent tweets from friends (see above screenshot)
- Typing into the window sends your text as a new tweet
- Does not show anyone as a contact under Twitter except for Twitter.com (though I will try out another plugin that does do this soon)

Identi.ca
- Works the exact same way as Twitter, see everything above except I don't have another plugin to try out.
- Should work also with Laconica servers, but I didn't test it.

QQ
- Doesn't work currently, must force 2008 protocol first

MySpaceIM
- Doesn't work currently, not sure why yet

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Other plugins that I will be trying out and hopefully packaging at some point include Skype (integrates contacts from the Skype app, but Skype must remain open), XFire, SIPE (MS Office Communicator), another Twitter plugin and maybe the Off The Record plugin that a lot of you have asked about over the years.

More good news, some Collabora and some Nokia employees have stated they will try to help out and make sure we get as many of them working as possible on Fremantle as well as Diablo.

I'll keep updating this thread with major milestones... for the low-down on the actual day-to-day hacking, follow me on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/zerojay/).

Oh yeah, also forgot... very good chance that all these plugins can also be used simply with Pidgin... as long as it's not too old anyways.