Facebook integrates Skype video chat service

Posted by elena On Friday, July 8th 2011 in Technology

Facebook launched on Wednesday its brand new video chat service, powered by Skype. Users of the social network will soon be able to make video calls directly from their Facebook page. The service will be entirely free.

Facebook and Skype have joined forces to add a video call feature to the mega-popular social network. From now on, Facebook users will have a Call button available on their page. Clicking on it will launch the chat window, which will appear on the same page, inside the browser window. The new video chat service was unveiled on Wednesday, 6 July, at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, California, by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Tony Bates of Skype.

The move can be easily viewed as a way for Facebook to fend off potential competition from Google. The Internet giant has recently launched its own social network, Google+, which provides users with a video calling service. Google's Hangouts service has the advantage of allowing group calls, while the Facebook-Skype video chat feature only allows one-to-one calls at the moment. However, Skype indicated that in time it would add new features to the Facebook service. Google announced the launch of its social network only one week ago. Up to ten people will be able to video chat with each other on Google's Hangouts.

At the launching event on Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the website had passed the 750 million active users mark. Despite the impressive figure, the founder of the social network added that the number of users was no longer the best measure of success, but that the right indicator was the amount of content these users shared, which had reached four billion items per day. According to Zuckerberg, the amount of information shared every day on Facebook has doubled over the last year and will continue to grow.

Zuckerberg also spoke of social apps, such as video chat, as a point of focus in the near future. Skype CEO Tony Bates said of the partnership with Facebook that it would be a "long-term relationship" to benefit both parties. The collaboration between Facebook and Skype seems only natural, since Skype is about to be purchased by Microsoft and the software giant is also a major investor in Facebook. In May, Microsoft decided to pay $8.5 billion for Skype; now, it starts to look like a good investment.