Linking Google Talk (or other jabber systems) with Facebook and MSN

Darren Poulson - Sat, 07/16/2011 - 12:38

With more people moving to google+, I thought I'd write up how to link Facebook chat (and MSN) to Google Talk. This allows you to chat to people online on Facebook without actually being logged in.

This write up uses the Spectrum.im transport, hosted on one of my servers. Its all experimental, and I do have a habit of breaking it on the odd occasion. What I'm trying to say is, I offer no support for this at all, and it isn't my fault if your phone explodes or the earths magnetic field reverses. :)

Caveats/Notes:

  • This will add all your facebook friends into your gmail contacts. It can get messy in there and take a little time to sort out. Google's find duplicates can help a lot.
  • Some friends come through with the correct name, some don't. Not entirely sure why this is, but you can show the user info and get the real name. 
  • If you have friends grouped in Facebook, and those groups are set to show you offline, they will still be offline when linked to Google. Controlling which groups are online/offline still has to be done in Facebook
  • This will also tie into the gtalk client on android phones.

NB: I'll add some screenshots shortly

First of all, you need to download PSI and set that to log into your Google Talk account. Start PSI and it will ask you to add an account. Add an existing account, and simply put your gmail email address and password in the form, and create the account. You should now be online with Google Talk via PSI

Next step is to add the Facebook (or MSN) transport. Click on the General menu, and select Service Discovery. It'll automatically try to find services associated with gmail.com, but will fail. Click OK to remove the error message, and replace gmail.com with tinynetworks.co.uk. Hopefully you should then be presented with a list of available services. Some of these will be unavailable, but you should see the XMPP and MSN ones as usable.

XMPP is the transport to use for Facebook, thankfully they actually use a standard instant messenger protocol, infact it is actually the same protocol as Google uses, but neither have actually turned on the full features of these protocols to allow you to interact, hence the need for this howto.

Double click on XMPP and a box will open. Enter your Facebook vanity id, with @chat.facebook.com on the end (my.vanity.id@chat.facebook.com), and your password. Once you click on register, the transport should then be associated with your Google account and show up in PSI. You may have to right click on the transport in PSI and select Log In. You should get an authorisation request, accept this, then hopefully that will be followed shortly by a request to add all your Facebook friends.

All your friends should now be showing up in Google Talk, and in your contacts. As stated above, some names will show up correctly, others may show the facebook id. This may need some housekeeping, and if you already have people in your contacts you should be able to simply use the find and merge duplicates option in the GMail contacts section.

Any questions, queries, etc. feel free to get in touch. I'll try and help, but I offer no guarantees or support.

Darren.