Facebook tells Meebo to rework Chat integration

Facebook has instructed Meebo to temporarily take down its newly implemented Facebook Chat integration. According to Meebo, Facebook would like them to, "...connect to their network in a different way." Facebook has committed developers from Chat and Facebook Connect to help Meebo get Facebook Chat up and working on the service again.

To be clear, Facebook is in no way discouraging Meebo from integrating Facebook Chat into its service; it's just asking Meebo to hook-in through a new and most likely more secure method. Facebook has a history of cracking down on unauthorized uses of their data or services. Most notably, we saw Facebook ask Plaxo to stop scraping their data. It's definitely a step in the right direction that Facebook is helping Meebo find a secure solution to Chat integration.

The official response from Meebo is below.

As a bunch of you already know (because you've been using it), we recently added Facebook Chat into Meebo.

We have been speaking to the Facebook team, and it turns out, they'd like us to connect to their network in a different way. In the interim, they asked us take Facebook off Meebo, and we said "okay."

However, we were glad to hear that the Facebook team was genuinely excited to see their network on Meebo, especially since they already have plans to open Facebook Chat. They also committed resources from their Chat and Facebook Connect teams to do extra work with us to get Facebook Chat back on Meebo "really, really soon."

Work began this week, so stay tuned. We expect some all nighters on both sides!

[drburning]

"Trust in the experts" said Virgilio 2000 years ago... Meebo is much more experienced than facebook. In addition, Facebook hasn't done a good work developing their own chat protocol instead of using an existing and open one like jabber.

[3rdalbum]

Would you believe, Facebook chat (via plugin) is the only thing keeping me with Pidgin. When Meebo has it again, I'll be switching instantly. It's good to hear that Facebook is happy for third-party chat clients to connect to its chat service.

[netcrash]

And what about other services? Are they going to give extended api to work with chat besides the offical api that needs user's confirmation to use chat api? I mean for example i need a mobile stand alone app and i have no way to ask user for confirmation