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We are working on a app which allows user to login only through facebook. Now we are planning to bring in chat aspect using facebook xmpp.

Before i go ahead, juts wanted to check if it is possible for people to chat each other through our app even though they are not friends on the facebook?

This is important to us as our app might need interactions between users who are not friends on facebook.

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2 Answers 2

Facebook Chat on XMPP requires that you be Facebook friends with all chatting parties. Otherwise it could be used to spam people with messages from people they do not know.

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Thanks for the answer. Dont you think people accessing the same application at a time might need to talk to each other? Say for example i have a location based app for car pooling,which uses facebook for user authentcation. Now i would like my users to chat each other and strike a better deal even when they are not friends on facebook. Is there anyway i can achieve this through facebook itself ? –  praveena_kd Jul 11 '12 at 19:26
Facebook chat API is meant to allow you to recreate the Facebook chat experience as on facebook.com, hence it only allows messages between friends. Ref: developers.facebook.com/docs/chat Perhaps you could consider using a local Jabber service within your website to achieve this non-friends chatting functionality? –  Jonathan Dean Jul 11 '12 at 19:48
you are better off not using Facebook and go all out with XMPP because Facebook does not support XMPP. hence why you can't cross communicate. –  user595349 Mar 3 '13 at 9:14

I'm not a Facebook developer, so I don't know if this helps. But keep in mind that you can send normal messages to non-friends as long as the recipient hasn't blocked them. In other words, you could try falling back to the regular messaging system if the recipient is not on the user's friend list; that is, simply route the "chat" through the normal messaging API instead. Similarly, if a non-friend sends you a message, then the app pulls that from the inbox and delivers it to your chat window.

There are two caveats to this approach, though:

  1. Gaining access to the messaging API (at least for reading other users' messages) gives the app access to all of the user's inbox contents, and many users may be unwilling to grant that permission.
  2. Facebook has said that the inbox isn't intended for real-time communication, and that users that "misuse" it may find their messaging feature temporarily disabled. See: http://www.facebook.com/help/132736263468691/
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Thanks Danny. As you have rightly said the users may not be willing to share the permission for reading inbox contents. As of now for our app we have built the chatting mechanism using RabitMQ. –  praveena_kd Oct 15 '12 at 6:22

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