One of the things I like most about Twitter is the ability to receive people's status updates via IM. If I had to visit the page several times a day to check for updates, I'd probably never use the service. Even using a feed aggregator to subscribe to something that receives short updates so frequently isn't very convenient.

Well, here's how you can do the same with Facebook - get your friends' status updates via IM. This should work with AIM, MSN/WLM, and Jabber/GTalk, but I've only tested it out with GTalk so far.

When you go to the Facebook Status Updates page, you should see something that looks like this:

Right-click the "Friends' Status Updates" link (highlighted in the image above), and copy the feed URL to the clipboard. Then, head over to Feed Crier, enter your screen name, IM network, and paste the URL you copied earlier into the Website box. The nice thing about Feed Crier is that you don't need to create an account with them. You should immediately start receiving status updates via IM, and you can stop them at any time by simply sending an "unsubscribe" message to the bot (send it a "help" message for more info).

There. Quick and easy. :)

Now we just need a way to setstatus updates via the Facebook API. There have been numerous requests for this on the Facebook Developers group, so it might happen sometime.