I'm happy to say Facebook just approved the integration we did between FaceBook, the SoapBox Server, and the SoapBox Communicator.

This means you can now log into the SoapBox Communicator using your FaceBook credentials, and have your complete friends list and all their Avatars. You don't need to sign up for an account, or register in any way - just add SoapBox to your FaceBook Profile, download the application, and log in.

Once you've logged in, your Facebook friends are auto-populated into your Roster, and as soon as they login or out of the Communicator, you receive presence notifications and can chat with them.

From there, you can do all the usual things in the SoapBox Communicator. This includes sharing Ultimate Emoticons, using the Share Pane, participate in Conference Rooms, and other fun stuff.

To bring a little bit of .Net content to this blog, the SoapBox Communicator is written completly in C#. The FaceBook pages that we put together are written in ASP.Net using quite a bit of the AJAX toolkit.

From a fun Async Perspective, JD went ahead and wrote a set of classes that wrapped the Facebook API's and are thread safe. These classes are fully Asynchronous and use the standard Begin/End pattern complete with IAsyncResults. Doing this allowed execution of FQL in a way that makes sense in production, scalable applications. The Microsoft C# wrappers for Facebook are synchronous and not at all thread safe.

There should be quite a bit more coming soon, but for now the basic integration is there.

For those who read this blog and are on Facebook, feel free to add me as a friend. My profile is 'cmullins@coversant.com'. I figure that email address is safe to give out, as it's just not possible to receive more spam than I already do. :)