How To Add Facebook Chat To The Mac OS X Messages App

Both the Facebook app itself as well as the dedicated Facebook Messenger app allow you to chat with your Facebook friends on your smartphone, giving you two very easy ways to keep in touch with them. When it comes to OS X though, despite Facebook’s integration in Mountain Lion, no native chat feature exists in the OS itself that would allow you to connect with your Facebook friends. If you would like to integrate Facebook chat with OS X itself without having to resort to a third-party app, you need look no further than the Messages app in OS X that is more than capable of acting as a chat client for Facebook. Here’s how you can set the app up to send and receive chat messages from Facebook,

To add your Facebook account to Messages, you need to provide your credentials in form of your Facebook user name followed by @chat.facebook.com. If you don’t know what your user name is, visit your Facebook profile in your browser and check the URL bar. Just make sure to copy it exactly as it appears after facebook.com/ including any periods (in case it has any), and you’re ready to proceed.

Next, open Message on your Mac, go to the ‘Accounts’ tab in its preferences and add a new Jabber account. Under ‘Account Name’, add your Facebook username followed by ‘@chat.facebook.com’ (without the quotes). Enter you Facebook account’s password under the ‘Password’ field, click ‘Done’, and you’re really done!

Open Messages and wait until your Jabber status changes to ‘Available’. In the ‘To’ field, start typing a friend’s name and it will pull a list of friends from Facebook, searching them as you type. Messages will also show a friend’s online status. Messages you send and receive will be saved by Messages, while you can still access them on Facebook itself as well. For those conversations that you’d prefer not to keep a record of, here’s how you can delete your Messages history in OS X Mountain Lion.

For those who haven’t upgraded to Mountain Lion, this trick will work in the iChat app as well, since it can also connect over Jabber. If you’ve upgraded to Mountain Lion but haven’t connected your Facebook account, you need not worry because this method with Messages works independently of it. Facebook will detect when you are using another chat client, and its web alerts i.e. those annoying sounds that make me think my battery is about to die will be automatically disabled. You will be able to send messages to both online and offline friends, but Messages will not be able to mimic the ‘Seen’ feature that tells you a message has been read. If you are using a separate chat client merely for Facebook chat, this method can prove to be one very good alternative to it.

[via Mactuts+]

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Fatima Wahab

Fatima has been writing for AddictiveTips for six years. She began as a junior writer and has been working as the Editor in Chief since 2014. Fatima gets an adrenaline rush from figuring out how technology works, and how to manipulate it. A well-designed app, something that solves a common everyday problem and looks

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