Huge news for Facebook lovers who always want to be connected with their Facebook contacts; Facebook is now preparing to launch XMPP (Extensive messaging and presence protocol).It means that users will be able to use Facebook with any type of XMPP clients, ranging from desktop to mobile clients.

Facebook encloses about 300 million potential users that can now use XMPP for chatting. This adds to large Google Talk figures and the many other large instant messaging deployments around the world, like Yandex and Live Journal. XMPP could become the most largely used instant messaging protocol in the coming months!

Facebook recently announced in their developer blog that they had the intention to support the XMPP protocol in May 2008: Using Facebook Chat via Jabber.

It is a proud fact that the XMPP support is built on a customized ejabberd XMPP server as announced several times by Facebook development team, including one of their latest conferences held in Edinburgh, in September 2009(Functional Programming at Facebook by Chris Piro and Eugene Letuchy.)

With Facebook chat on other instant messaging platforms, also comes the Facebook power of updating status and viewing online Facebook friends. This seems to be a next step ahead from the Facebook team to strengthen the power of social networking.