Instant messaging is about to get a lot more interesting and a lot more crowded if Facebook has its way. Apparently, the social network is very close to launching support for XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), allowing Facebook users to connect with any IM client which also supports the  protocol. Considering that the Facebook chat is already being used by some 70 million users and that the social network has passed 300 million active users, it's easy to see why this could be very big.

The Facebook Chat project was started about two years ago and it was launched in April 2008. Since then, it has grown along with the site to become one of the most popular IM protocols in the world. It's not challenging the big players like Yahoo or Microsoft yet, but for a web-only service, it has done remarkably well. About a year and a half ago, Facebook announced its plans to build a Jabber/XMPP interface for the Chat and said it should be available soon.

Since then though, the social network has stayed quiet, with not much happening on that front. Meebo and a handful of other services have introduced support for Facebook Chat a few months back and now it looks like this was just a limited trial to test Facebook's XMPP technology. However, there are now talks that the social network may be very close to roll out full support and access to the interface.

For the users, this means that they'll soon be able to log into Facebook Chat using any IM client which supports the protocol without having to be logged into the site as well. Most multi-protocol clients are capable of handling XMPP connections and so does Google's GTalk, unsurprisingly, since Google uses the same XMPP technology to power its own IM service and has been a major backer of the protocol. Once Facebook enables full XMPP support, the protocol will become the most popular in the world.