Grouping Facebook Contacts in Empathy

You can’t. Facebook doesn’t support editing of groups in their jabber implementation. The trick then becomes to assign groups through facebook.

This is done by logging into facebook and choosing ‘Edit Friends’ from the ‘Account’ drop-down menu. The process is first to create the groups (lists in facebook-lingo) and then to assign contacts (friends in facebook-lingo) to them.

Facebook chat revisited

Earlier attempts at connecting Empathy (under Ubuntu) to the facebook chat have proven short-termed[1,2].

In a bizarre twist of fate, the people at Facebook have put on their white hats and done the right thing by exposing their chat functionality under the banner of XMPP/Jabber. There is an official guide with step-by-step instructions for a few specific clients and the general information needed to connect any other client.

There also exists a step-by-step guide for Empathy. Do note, that when adding the account, you want to “Reuse an existing account”, and not “Create a new account”.

I might come up with some cleaner instructions …

Facebook chat with Empathy under Ubuntu (Karmic)

Update 2: New solution.

Update 1: This no longer works for me. I’m getting the feeling that Facebook might be messing around with the protocol …

The solution for Jaunty seems to have degenerated.

I recently installed Karmic (Koala) Beta and decided to give it a try again. For me, installing the pidgin-facebookchat package and following the instructions at the relevant (bottom) part of the official documentations page regarding protocols. The experience is not entirely stable, but for a beta release I guess it’s ok.

Empathy gives “Network Error”

Recently empathy has been giving randomish errors for certain protocols, mostly MSN and Facebook. The message is “Network Error“.

This forum thread hints a solution: Simply run “killall telepathy-butterfly” and restart empathy.

Facebook chat with Empathy and Ubuntu

Update 3: New solution.

Update 2: With the forthcomming release of Karmic Koala this guide becomes (more or less) obsolete. This guide deals with the new situation.

Updata 1: This guide no longer seems to work for me.

This article explains how to configure Empathy under Ubuntu (9.04 Jaunty Jackelope) to interface with Facebook Chat.

On the technical side of things, the indea is to use pidgin-facebookchat – a libpurple plugin – through telepathy-haze – a telepathy connection manager based on libpurple – to establish and maintain the connection. The plugin can be used directly with Pidgin for similar results.

First, we need to install the needed packages (I assume that empathy is installed):

sudo apt-get install pidgin-facebookchat telepathy-haze

As described here and here you then need to do some fiddling. This might change in the future. What you need to do is:

cp /usr/share/telepathy/managers/haze.manager /tmp/
wget https://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=20810
sudo mv attachment.cgi?id=20810 /usr/share/telepathy/managers/haze.manager
wget https://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=20811
sudo mv attachment.cgi?id=20811 /usr/share/mission-control/profiles/bigbrownchunx-facebookim-haze.profile

Note: The two sudo lines will override any existing files. Since the first file should exist prior to the operation, one should make sure that nothing is removed from it during the operation. Do this by comparing /tmp/haze.manager and /usr/share/telepathy/managers/haze.manager. The latter should be the prior plus a section for the bigbrownchunx-facebookim protocol.

Turning off Beacon

Facebook have finally offered a solution to one of their major privacy issues: Beacon. Users of the webside can now completely opt-out. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, apologizes and provides a link for doing so.

Now we only need Facebook to change their terms of use, so that they are no longer allowed to do whatever to whatever information they gather about the users. See this facebook group for details.

It seems like these issues will continue, especially since the alliance with Microsoft.