The social network prepares to launch instant messaging platform

May 14, 2008 13:04 GMT  ·  By

Facebook wants to become an even more powerful player on the social networking market by using an instant messaging platform, AllFacebook, an unofficial Facebook blog wrote today. According to the same source, the new platform will come with support for Jabber/XMPP support chat, which means the Facebook application will allow users to communicate on the web using this protocol. Allowing developers to build more advanced applications seems to be one of the most important keys in Facebook's evolution, as the social network is known to have released such updates every once in a while.

The instant messaging platform will provide great functionality for both developers and regular users. While developers will be able to implement chatting support into their applications, users will have the ability to communicate on the web using the Facebook application, which comes with Jabber/XMPP support.

"While a number of instant messaging desktop clients have already figured out a way to access Facebook's chat system, this will enable anybody to access Facebook to chat more efficiently. By providing Jabber/XMPP access to developers, Facebook also hopes to further extend the reach of Facebook as a mainstream instant messaging platform," Nick O'Neill of AllFacebook wrote in the blog post.

Facebook is surely one of the top social networks currently existent on the web and, along with MySpace, leads the social networking industry with millions of users every day. In fact, at the time of signing a deal with the Redmond-based company Microsoft, Facebook's officials even provided some stats, saying that their social network records more than 200,000 new users every day, visitors that usually come from all over the world. Facebook is based in Palo Alto, California and was released in February 2004 but the number of users exploded after approximately one year, along with the increase of the number of social networking fans.