Setting up a Facebook account in BitlBee

Facebook's offering a XMPP server for some time already, which means you can use their chat using any XMPP/Jabber client, including BitlBee.

To be able to use it, you do need to have a Facebook username.

   1 23:44:32 <wilmer> account add jabber `yourusername`@chat.facebook.com ''yourpassword''
   2 23:44:32 <root> Account successfully added
   3 23:44:42 <wilmer> account set facebook/nick_source full_name
   4 23:44:42 <root> nick_source = `full_name'
   5 23:44:43 <wilmer> account on
   6 23:44:44 <root> jabber(wvdgaast@chat.facebook.com) - Logging in: Connecting
   7 23:44:44 <root> jabber(wvdgaast@chat.facebook.com) - Logging in: Connected to server, logging in
   8 23:44:45 <root> jabber(wvdgaast@chat.facebook.com) - Logging in: Authentication finished
   9 23:44:45 <root> jabber(wvdgaast@chat.facebook.com) - Logging in: Server changed session resource string to `BitlBee_5d9293ae_4870E52387B28'
  10 23:44:46 <root> jabber(wvdgaast@chat.facebook.com) - Logging in: Authenticated, requesting buddy list
  11 23:44:47 <root> jabber(wvdgaast@chat.facebook.com) - Logging in: Logged in

All contacts have numeric handles, which makes for very ugly usernames by default, since nicknames are generated from the IM handle. By setting the nick_source account setting to full_name, the nicknames will be generated based on the full names.

Alternatively, irssi users can use this script to rename the contacts. The nick_source setting was only added in BitlBee 1.2.6, and also the irssi script can translate some non-ASCII characters to something more IRC-friendly, whereas BitlBee will just strip everything non-ASCII.