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Comment by rubymancer | Hacker News Reader

> So, Facebook used interoperable tools to let ex-MySpace users eat their cake and have it too. Facebook provided those MySpace users with a “bot,” an automated program that used the user’s login and password to impersonate that user to MySpace, scraping the user’s waiting messages and putting them in their Facebook inbox.

I had completely forgotten about this!

It's unthinkable today. As the piece says, if the tech giants feel the least bit threatened by a competitor they will just buy them up without any sort of regulatory hassle.

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There was a point in history where both facebook and google offered XMPP with federation to their chats

You could just join any XMPP server and chat with your google/facebook contacts directly from that. Imagine that now...

Facebook never offered federated XMPP. They did offer federated email for a short while.

They provided XMPP gate - it did not federated with other servers but you were able to use multi-account client (e.g. Pidgin) and have it everything in one window. I did exactly that.

I seem to remember being able to chat with Facebook users from my personal server, but it doesn’t look like it was possible [1].

Actually, searching for this stuff made me sad :(

There are blog posts from Facebook still up about how they are using XMPP [2]. There are still notes out there on setting it up in Pidgin [3].

The internet has become a walled-off mess, and it makes me depressed to see such a powerful and wonderful technology abused like this.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5052780/integrating-face...

[2] https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/110/

[3] https://m.facebook.com/notes/socialblogr/how-to-setup-facebo...

PS: looking through the other posts on the fb developer blog (just changing the number in the url) is interesting.

MBA has entered the chat.

> It's unthinkable today.

Not really. There were all sorts of tools available to migrate off twitter once new management began to screw it up.

(Of course they have since been blocked).

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