Comment 3 for bug 258497

I'm guessing you were hit by the same bug I was.
http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/issues/detail?id=139

If you run "pidgin --debug," is the last message before pidgin does something about "Error resolving 0.channel01.facebook.com"? The author has fixed that crash and it now works for me. He hasn't released the fix yet, but I just compiled it from source.