[mattwdelong]

I thought it would be a more obvious question, but how do you think this will affect the other big messenger clients/protocols? MSN/YIM/AIM/GTalk ?

I already noticed a trend in which a large portion of my friends will use facebook chat now and not even bother to login to MSN Messenger (which is the most popular client in my geographical area).

[rlpb]

The massive benefit for me is that all my friends are already on Facebook. It's effectively got automatic roster management, which is a killer feature since I don't normally get round to adding people to MSN (which is also the most popular client in my geographical area).

I reckon that because Facebook has such a large number of users already, this has the potential to kill the other IM networks. Maybe it's not so good for properly federated XMPP, though, since this also presumably means that Facebook have no real incentive to implement it.

[dlsspy]

gtalk is xmpp, so this will be a boost.

However, facebook's xmpp implementation is even more restricted than google's so far. It's not even federated as of yet (not that facebook sees a need for their users to communicate outside of their network). Not federated means things like [twitterspy](http://dustin.github.com/twitterspy/) won't work.

They also don't pass many stanza types through. For example, I've seen complaints of people trying to send jingle IQs through in order to establish direct connections between two users. That's not there (yet?).

However, it does mean that you don't have to get a new chat client. I added another account to adium as xmpp and all's well. Just hoping people don't actually start talking to me over it.

[blasdel]

Google could integrate it in the gmail gchat implementation the same way they do AIM -- just log into multiple accounts instead of federating.