First there was IRC, followed by services such as MSN Messenger or AIM and now everyone and their semi-literate dog are using Facebook Chat. Some would say that contacting your friends over the internet has never been easier, but personally I view FC (that’s right, I’m acronyming it up, I think living with an accountant may be rubbing off on me) to be a step in the wrong direction.

Now don’t get me wrong, Facebook was the perfect platform to build a new system on, it’s got a much higher adoption rate than anything else before, it just doesn’t work as I’d like. The problem? Who wants to leave a browser with Facebook open all the time, the chat window system of yesteryear was so much better. Now I’m sure there’re going to be people who disagree with me (when will people realise that I’m always right…), but for those who feel the same as me there is an alternative.

It’s actually been around pretty much since the inception of FC but managed to pass me by somehow, figuring that the same may apply to you lovely people I thought I’d tell you what it’s all about.

Basically you can get a plug-in for the popular Instant-Messaging client Pidgin. If you haven’t already, go download and install Pidgin, followed by the plug-in and you’re sorted. You should now be able to add your Facebook account along with many others.

Yay! Short but sweet, that’s got to be worthy of some kind of record. There’s only one negative that I’ve come across, and that’s when you visit Facebook the chat window things still pop up as if you were using it normally. Now I don’t live on Facebook so don’t find this to be a problem, though I can see how some would find it annoying. You can still use the chat normally when you’re on the site if it bugs you, leaving you in a best-of-both-worlds situation. It would however be nice if it were possible to switch it off somehow.

I’m very impressed, I never used FC before, it just didn’t seem worth the hassle and now I use it all the time. What do you think? Obviously many people are perfectly happy with the way the system works but do you think this method is an improvement? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Edit – You can also do this within AIM.