Adium 1.3 adds support for Facebook chat

If you use Apple’s iChat, but have friends on other services like Yahoo, MSN or GoogleTalk (among others), you should take a look at Adium. It’s free, and supports pretty much every messaging platform on the planet. And, starting this week, you can add yet another.. Adium now supports Facebook, as part of its recent v1.3 update.

Users of the ‘new’ Facebook lately have likely seen the new status bar located at the bottom of the page. It show friend updates and other notifications, as well as allowing chat between users in a pop-up window. It works, but it also keeps you isolated (by design?) from your other messaging services, where you’re likely to have a lengthy history and buddy list. If you’d rather keep all of your buddies in one place, Adium is the answer.

The beloved Mac-only messaging application has a lively developer community as well, where fans create and alter themes both for buddy lists and messaging windows. With various colors, alignments and transparency options, you can easily find a theme that will blend in with your existing desktop and other apps.

Adium requires Mac OS X 10.4.. get the v1.3 update here