integration of facebook chat to bitlbee

[cimnine <cimnine@…>]

Today I was wondering, if bitlbee could implement the (inofficial) Facebook chat API, like Adium did.

After having a look at the MSN code of Bitlbee, together with the inofficial chat API doc, I found, that it would be possible.

​http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/facebook-chat-api/ describes the protocol and provides a (ruby) example too. You may wan't to have a look (or reuse code) from the pidgin plugin: ​http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/

Quick Sum: The facebook API works on basis of HTTP. It uses JSON and a technic called Comet for it's messages. Login is done based on Username & Password. Afterwards you have to extract some values from the page you get. From now on, you can forget HTML (for this task at least). Because now every thing is handles with GET and POST requests. Calling a URL - getting an answer.

Sadly, my C-skills are very, very basic - and I don't have a clue about the bitlbee API, so I decided to open a ticket here.

~Chris

[MentalFS <bitlbee-bugs@…>]

It is possible to connect to Facebook right now, but not directly. You need to set up an account with www.nimbuzz.com and then setup a connection to facebook there. It works like a jabber transport. This means you have to give your password to them.

After that, you cann add that account to BitlBee just like any other Jabber account (<nickname>@nimbuzz.com).

There are two things missing for me:

• For some reason, the nicknames won't be transferred correctly - all the contacts are cryptic numbers which have to be renamed by hand.
• There's no way to set an away state just for one contact. This ist usually the way to disable a transport by setting yourself to offline just for that one (Jabber allows such things). If you only use Nimbuzz for Facebook, and not for other networks (like MySpace), you can of course just do an account off.

[CodeBlock]

This no longer works, unfortunately, as per ​http://forum.nimbuzz.com/index.php?topic=2915.0

Any other ways to make this work? This is really the only thing preventing me from switching from pidgin to bitlbee 100%.

[Wilmer van der Gaast <wilmer@…>]

You may want to try the libpurple branch together with the libpurple-facebookchat plugin.

[CodeBlock]

How would I go about compiling in the libpurple-facebookchat plugin? My C/C++ skills are.... well, nonexistent right now. If it's just a matter of some Makefile hacketry I could try my hand at it, but if it requires some code porting, I'm afraid I'm going to have to wait until I either learn C better, or someone is able to do it and release it.

[wilmer]

You can download the BitlBee libpruple branch and compile it yourself, which should be a matter of configure + make. The libpurple-facebookchat plugin is available as a package for most Linux distros so that shouldn't be a problem either.

[anonymous]

Sweet, facebook grew a half brain and added XMPP support, bitlbee works as is!

However, handles are random strings, can we maybe fix that?

​http://www.facebook.com/ajax/sitetour/chat.php?jabber_client=3

[anonymous]

Can use this script to rename uid's to something sensical: ​http://a.ngus.net/bitlbee_rename.pl

Not perfect; but it's a start.

[wilmer]

changeset:devel,499 adds a nick_source setting to every account. If you set it to full_name/first_name, nicknames on Facebook XMPP connections will look much better.

Anyway, I'm closing this bug since with these XMPP servers, I see little reason for native fb support.

[anonymous]

So how do I add my facebook account to bitlbee?

<13:53 @hackeron> account add xmpp email password <13:53 @root> Unknown protocol <13:53 @hackeron> account add facebook email password <13:53 @root> Unknown protocol

[cimnine]

account add xmpp userid@… password (userid is not your fb login!, see: ​http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php ) Cheers, Chris

[anonymous]

<21:14 @hackeron> account add xmpp userid@... password <21:14 @root> Unknown protocol

Now what?

[Wilmer van der Gaast <wilmer@…>]

Jabber, not XMPP.

[anonymous]

This kind of worked:

account add jabber userid@… password

But all my contacts are numeric and I have to do info -504515740 to get the person's name, any ideas how to get the names to display instead?

[Wilmer van der Gaast <wilmer@…>]

help set nick_source account set facebook/nick_source full_name

[bitlbee.org@…]

The exact command that worked for me was:

acc 0 set nick_source full_name

Replace "0" with the appropriate account number that you get from "account list".