Facebook is going ahead with their own IM service that will be built directly onto the social network’s pages, and will use the Jabber open-source platform that Gtalk uses. This will allow users of other popular chat services to fuse Facebook chat with their favorite other instant messaging clients.

This comes at the expense of third party developers (like Social.IM), some of whom were being funded. No more; it’s over, and all the time and money that went into developing these services is for naught.

It smells a little bit like the Microsoft way of doing business, where you steamroll small developers that create something hot and come over the top with your own service, offered for free, killing the little guy.

However, with something as huge as an IM client, you can hardly blame Facebook for using their many powers to create an app that fits in best with their vision of the future. With 60 million users, this is going to be pretty big, and they wanted to do it their way.

Story via Techcrunch and Michael Arrington

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 1:25 pmand is filed under Social Media, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.