This week saw the integration of two major players in online communications. At an event at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a deal between his company and Skype, the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) provider. Zuckerberg heralded the partnership as “the start of a new era of social networking.”
The partnership will let Skype users view and post Facebook updates within the Skype application, while Facebook users will be able to video chat with their friends. The video chat service is part of a larger overhaul of Facebook’s chat application. The service lets you see only the friend you exchange the most message with, instead of your entire friends list (much like making specific lists of friends for your news feed). They have also introduced multi-user chat, so that you can have a conversation involving three or more of your friends at once. Group videos are not yet available, neither is any sort of video chat on Facebook mobile.
It’s also a fascinating partnership in terms of business. Skype is set to be purchased by Microsoft, which is already a large investor in Facebook. It certainly sweetens the deal for Microsoft, as Facebook will now introduce its 750 million users to the Skype brand.
Though the Facebook-Skype deal has probably been in the works for a while now, it seems like a direct challenge to the “Hangouts” feature (basically the same sort of video chat service) of Google’s new social networking platform, Google+.
Do you use Skype already and look forward to blending with your contacts on Facebook? If you’ve never used Skype, are you excited to video chat with your Facebook friends, or is it another new feature you probably won’t use?
Don’t forget to check out our USB VoIP Phone Handset, which is compatible with Skype.
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