#Adium facebook cookies update
#Adium facebook cookies free

Facebook has asked me to make a choice in which I can't win: I can either be disconnected from my friends, or I can compromise my ability to perform at work 1) by keeping a Facebook window open (or by checking my cell phone regularly). Obviously, this is very frustrating for me. Unfortunately, this change will mean that it'll be impossible for me to use Facebook Messenger. I'm not the only one I know at least a few other friends who use Facebook Messenger in this way. I use Pidgin at work, and Adium at home, to connect to Facebook Messenger, because it's important to me that I be able to stay in touch with my friends without the distractions of the rest of Facebook. All three of these programs can be extended by their users to add additional functionality, like private and secure messaging (so that the IM service can't read your messages). They also are useful because they let you take control of how you interact with instant messages for instance, Pidgin (for Windows) and Adium (for Mac) integrate into your desktop like any other app on your computer, and naim integrates into a programmer's “shell”. These programs are useful because they let you put all of your IMs in one place, even if they don't all come from the same network. Luckily, however, I didn't have to, because someone else already had! A bunch of these programs, Instant Messenger “clients”, already exist – and not only can they speak to Facebook, but they can talk to a whole bunch of different instant messaging networks: Internet Relay Chat the Jabber network at large AIM (remember that?!) Google Talk (more on that one later.) and a handful more that I didn't list. It's called a protocol because many different systems all act the same way to talk to each other, even if they aren't made by the same company in fact, even if I didn't have a system that spoke XMPP, it's an “open” protocol, which means that if I were sufficiently motivated, I could read about how it works and write a program to make my computer speak with Facebook's. XMPP (better known as “Jabber”, when it's part of an interconnected system) is an instant messaging protocol you can think of it like a backbone of instant messaging, just as the “Simple Mail Transport Protocol” (a different way that a system of computers talk to each other) is the backbone of e-mail. What, exactly, changed, and why does it matter? Facebook have announced that on April 30th, they will be shutting down their '''' XMPP server. The first, maybe most obvious, question, is direct.

#Adium facebook cookies free

Please feel free to get in touch if you have other feedback, or you can also comment on the Heckler News thread.

#Adium facebook cookies update

This post got somewhat more visibility than I'd expected! I've added an update at the bottom with some responses to feedback that I've received. I have tried to write this article in terms that serve both a technical and non-technical audience. The long story, which you can read below, is that this change reopens the question of Facebook's – or, really, any company's – stewardship of how people can interact with their friends, and argues strongly for better regulation of services that have widespread network effects. The short story is that Facebook has decided to get rid of the way that I use Facebook Messenger (and, from there, to force me to use their web site) since I try to keep IMs confined to a single window on my desktop to reduce distractions, Facebook Messenger will become completely unusable for me at work, and mostly unusable for me at home. Starting sometime on April 30th, 2015, you'll find it difficult to contact me through Facebook Messenger.