A year ago this day, Facebook announced “Right now we’re building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat“. The news has been greeted positively in various places everywhere.

A year later, strictly nothing happened, and that silence has not gone unnoticed. Facebook has not even issued the slightest announcement, except a wishlist bug report comment by Charlie Cheever mentioning that “some people are working on this.  It will probably be done in a few months. Sorry the timeline isn’t more clear“.

Is that all that a major player such as Facebook can do to interoperate with the rest of the instant messaging world ? Words with no deeds to back them up are very disappointing, especially from a player with ample means. Annoucements followed by complete silence are an even bigger blow to anyone’s credibility. Will Facebook step up to the plate ?

By federating with the rest of the XMPP world and especially with Google Talk, Facebook has an opportunity to make a huge splash in instant messaging in a rare case where their interests are aligned with their user’s. Why the silence ?

Maybe I should not be using Facebook at all. But it has been so successful at attracting the family, the non-geeks and the girls that I have settled for the compromise of using it while serving some constructive criticism. But I feel better at Identi.ca and Friendfeed…