Did you know you can chat with your Facebook contacts using Pidgin? All you have to do is head over to http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/downloads/list and download the plugin for your platform and install it.

Windows users can download the exe which will install the plugin into the plugins directory, and Ubuntu users can download the deb file and install it using the command

sudo dpkg -i pidgin-facebookchat-1.37.deb

Once it’s installed, head over to Accounts > Manage Accounts and Add a Facebook Chat account.

Link: Facebook Chat project page