Continuing on my path of using facebook without actually using facebook, I installed pidgin-facebook-chat to integrate facebook chat with my other chats (irc/icq). I now had the problem that I get too many notification messages since it tells me every time a friend logs on or off (which during peak times is once every few seconds).
To fix this, I wrote a script to only notify me when select users log on. You can find the gist of it here.