Comment Re:Federation? (Score 2, Informative) 174
Given that the interserver federation in xmpp doesn't scale well ( see http://about.psyc.eu/Jabber#Scalability ), I'm guessing the thought of federation is too scary an option for facebook. 60% of the packets in an xmpp network are presence packets and xmpp uses an extremely naive way of distributing these (i.e. it sends an xmpp presence message for each user in the buddy list, even if many of the users are on the same xmpp server and the presence packet could be only sent once for all of them and exploded by the server at the other end). This probably wouldn't be too much of an issue if not many people have buddies on other xmpp servers, but could be disastrous if it becomes popular. I'm guessing they'd also be reticent to do this because it would decrease their lockin of users, if you don't need a facebook account to talk to facebook users why would you bother using facebook.