I use Adium for IM on the Mac because, like most people, I have friends and colleagues on just about every IM system out there. I don’t love Adium, but it’s not bad. I’ve never been able to get my wife to reliably log on to any IM service during the day, which is annoying when I just want to shoot her a quick short message. She has taken to Facebook Chat, though, for better or worse.
Adium supports Facebook chat, but recently it hasn’t been showing any of my Facebook contacts. It turns out that the implementation in Adium right now is using a screen-scraping technique, and that’s a bit flaky. The solution is to use Facebook’s Jabber interface to its chat service. I configured this in Adium, and now it works like a charm. It also works in iChat, for those who are partial to that client.