Facebook? Or was that something else. All I remember is a golden age when between google and Facebook I had like 90% of my non work contacts available to chat with on pidgin. And my work used xmpp internally, it was glorious.

Facebook had a poorly maintained gateway into their chat system which spoke XMPP c2s (no federation). Was pretty much a hack to get people to stop asking for a Linux client until the web app became the only desktop option anyway.