Facebook Tipped to Announce Deal With Skype

[Jack]

Facebook has plans for an "awesome" unveiling Wednesday, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is expected to announce a partnership with Skype, the Internet video calling company.

Facebook is not saying exactly what is in store, but sources close to the companies say a Skype partnership is inevitable. The union would bring video-chat capabilities through Facebook, allowing multiple friends to talk at the same time.

Video chatting is one of the few social networking features lacking in Facebook, an omission that has become even more glaring since Google launched an application called Hangouts.


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[Jack]

Here is how this new feature should work :

The Google+ project: Explore Hangouts



Facebook trying to add the same features that Google+ has.
Not really a surprise there, I do think that Facebook will also make their "Groups", more visible .. maybe even re-design them.
The "Circles" feature is the main weapon of Google+ , and even if Facebook has already a similar feature , the simple fact that it it's very noticeable makes it useless for most of FB users.

 

[Vextor]

It's been released as the video-calling feature of FB.

 

[jamescv7]

That's a good news, if so then its nice to see it, I really like Skype since before when it comes from video calling.

 

[Deleted member 178]

yeah !! now hot webcam show on FB

 

[jamescv7]

From PC MAG

We already like Skype and, despite ambivalence, we're trained to use Facebook, so an announcement that brings the two together has our interest. Facebook Video Chat, announced at today's (debatably) "awesome" event, integrates Skype video calling into Facebook Chat. It isn't perfect—the video quality is average and calling is restricted to one friend, for now—but the new feature makes video calling a whole lot more convenient for Facebook's 750 million users.

From PC World

Facebook's new video chat feature--touted in a demo today at the company's headquarters as extremely easy to use--proved buggy in our initial tests.

In Facebook's demo, representatives seemed to indicate that all you have to do to start chatting is to approve the video chat applet, which loads in your browser. They said that no download is necessary.

However, we found the software installation more complicated than it was in Facebook's demonstration. When we tested the new chat feature on both Windows and Mac PCs, we were prompted to download and install the video chat software outside the browser. This makes the chat setup no simpler than gChat's video-calling feature. (Note: Facebook's chat does not yet work on Linux.)

 

[Jack]

Here you can see some promotion campaign



and a Demo




We can certainly say that social networks have now a new standard,video chatting.I don't know if this was really need it since you already could use Skype and talk to your friends.What this integration brings is "easy access" and that's about it.
Nevertheless if we take into account the fact that Facebook main competitor ,Google+ has also a similar feature I can only say that FB did a smart move when they've added Skype to their network.That said Facebook video call feature has one big missing feature when compared with Google+ Hangouts, it doesn't support a group video chat.

 

[jamescv7]

Actually I just only saw this Facebook new feature when I watched it from TV. So no regrets for partnership with Skype which is a highly known company.