Facebook Adds Video Calling, Group Chat

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Facebook has partnered with Skype to bring video calling to the world's largest social networking site and bolster its role as a central platform for online communications.

At a news conference at its Palo Alto headquarters Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced the company was rolling out a new group chat feature and a redesigned chat interface.

In announcing the new services, Zuckerberg confirmed Facebook had hit 750 million users, but spoke of a shift in social networking. Its gone from just getting people connected to building applications that improve the sharing of content.

"The driving narrative isn't going to be about wiring up the world, but what kinds of cool stuff are you going to be able to build now that you have this infrastructure in place," he said.

Facebook's introduction of video calling comes a week after Google unveiled Google+, its latest effort to take on Facebook in social media. While launched only on a limited basis so far, its drawn praise for features including its videoconferencing function allowing up to 10 people to participate in a video call.

The new Facebook video service, built into its chat platform, launches with only one-to-one capability, but Zuckerberg says group video chat may be coming in future. Users only have to click the video call button at the top of their chat window to begin a video conversation, once the call recipient has accepted the request.

Facebook executives and Skype CEO Tony Bates emphasized the ease-of-use, describing Facebook's video chat as "one-click" service tailored to the social network. Bates said Skype now averages more than 300 million video call users a month overall, but assured the company's underlying peer-to-peer technology would be able to handle the expected influx of new traffic from Facebook's huge user base.

Skype, which is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 billion, ultimately plans to benefit from the deal by offering premium services to Facebook users beyond the free video calling option. For now, "We want to be as pervasive as possible," said Bates.

The partnership could also potentially deepen ties between Facebook and Microsoft. Zuckerberg said his company already has a "really good relationship" through joint efforts such as social search on Bing. Video calling on Facebook is being rolled out in 70 languages starting today and should be available all users in the next few weeks.

In Facebook's other chat updates, its new group option will let users group multiple people into a single window to chat. People already online will get messages immediately while those offline will get a summary of the conversation at a later time.

That chat tool also includes a sidebar that shows all the friends who a user chats with most often. The idea is to make it easier for people to start a conversation. The sidebar adjusts according to the size of a user's browser window and "automatically appears when the window is wide enough," according to a Facebook blog post.

Earlier this year, Facebook unveiled a revamped messaging system spanning email, chat and instant messaging. Zuckerberg said the company would be introducing more new apps and services in the coming weeks and months as part of what he called its "launching season."

While integrating video calling will have little impact on marketers now, "in the long term, it will mean Facebook, already the No. 1 place for online word-of-mouth, will be a crucial platform for marketers to engage customers, whether it's through video chat with fans or through new partnerships they form with Facebook on their own," said Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran.

After saying last week the company planned to announce "something awesome" today, Zuckerberg kicked off widespread speculation that Facebook might unveil an iPad app or mobile photo-sharing service today. But there was no discussion of either or other rumored initiatives.

Zuckerberg noted, however, that the rise in sharing activity on Facebook shows growing demand for new kinds of apps. Users are now sharing material at twice the rate of a year ago, and that pace is expected to double again next year. As of now, that translates into 4 billion things being share on Facebook each day.

That increase is driven in part through Facebook's Groups feature, which more than half of its members have starting using a year after its launch. Most are made up of seven people or less. Google+ offers a similar tool called Circles for grouping people into different categories -- friends, co-workers, family, acquaintances -- that map to real world relationships. The aim is to provide more control over whom users share information with -- a perceived weakness of Facebook.

1 comment about "Facebook Adds Video Calling, Group Chat".
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  1. Jonathan Lord from Web Video Store, July 7, 2011 at 4:43 a.m.

    Its all about video chat at the minute and web video as Facebook and Google go up against each other in the social networking world but this team up of Facebook and Skype is a big deal people will now be talking face to face (well, face to screen) this may also keep people on there website for longer as most jump on Facebook check updates and most of the time don't chat (or is that just me) well with this new video calling people may stay on the site longer to talk to there friends as they can actually see them now. Facebook now also offers group chat meaning unlike before you can now all talk together in one chat.
    I for one won't use it but as the world of web video and people uploading more and more video online is happening every day I'm sure some will love this!

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