As widely speculated last week, Facebook’s “awesome” announcement Wednesday involved the social networking giant’s integration with Skype for an entirely new video calling platform that promises to once again revolutionize the way we interact with friends and family via Facebook.
Now when you’re on a friend’s profile, there will be a new button located between the ‘Message’ and ‘Poke’ buttons. The added button says ‘Call.’ Once you click the button, the friend will receive a popup message asking whether they want to accept or decline the call. If they accept, you will be immediately connected for a video chat.
“The video calling is so great and it’s so easy,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s Palo Alto, California headquarters, where he also confirmed that Facebook now has more than 750 million users.
“Your least-technical friend is going to be able to get online with video chat and get connected,” Zuckberg says of the new feature. “You’ll connect with your friends on the social network that already has all your friends.”
As it turns out, Facebook has integrated with Skype in a way that doesn’t place cumbersome set-up or installation burdens on Facebook users. All it takes to use the new service is a small plugin (which installs within seconds.) In fact, you don’t even need a Skype account to enjoy the video chat functionality now provided by Facebook.
Although Facebook’s new video platform represents a challenge to Apple’s FaceTime video chat service, there’s a possibility that Apple’s iDevices will be able to facilitate the Facebook video chat service in the near future. For the time being, however, Skype video chat in Facebook is a Web-only feature. In other words, don’t look for the “call” button within Facebook’s iPhone application.
