Facebook adding Skype video calling

msnbc.msn.com - 7/6/2011
Suzanne Choney

Facebook said it's bringing Skype video calling to the social networking site, dubbing it "Facebook Calling." The feature is being rolled out over the next several weeks. Those who want to try it immediately can download it here.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook now has more than 750 million users, and is "still growing quickly." Adding Skype, he said, brings the "best technology" for video chat to Facebook, which is probably "the biggest chat program online" in an era where people are not only connecting, but sharing information via many means.

Such sharing is what is going to dominate the future of the Internet, Zuckerberg said. Connecting with others -- "friending," for example -- was the mantra; now sharing information is, with Facebook's users sharing 4 billion things a day.

"The amount of information (users) share is about twice the amount of stuff they would have shared a year ago; and it will be twice as much a year from now; it's that kind of exponential growth." And social apps, or applications, like Skype, help make that possible.

"Video calling is the first example of what we think is a great social app," Zuckerberg said. "We’re going to see a lot more things like this over the next few years and months."

One-on-one calls is simple, Facebook says: If your friend is online, with "one quick click" on the call button, you can establish a call with that friend, a Facebook staffer said during the presentation Wednesday.

"Can you believe that your least technical friend can get online and connect with someone else? No separate accounts, no separate websites to go to; it's by far the easiest way to get connected by video."

Tony Bates, Skype CEO, said the company is averaging more than 300 million minutes of video a month, and 50 percent of its business is Internet traffic. Now, putting Skype into Facebook makes sense.

"There's no greater way to get to the Web than Facebook," he said.

Bates said he is not concerned about losing Skype customers who now use some of Skype's paid services to the social network's Skype program.

"We want to be as ubiquitous as possible," he said. "We made the strategic decision that the long-term partnership far outweighs the concern of users moving from Skype to Facebook."

And, he said, some of Skype's paid services will be advertised within the Facebook Skype program. Skype is in the process of being bought by Microsoft, which also owns a small percentage of Facebook. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

The video calling service will not be available via Facebook on mobile, Zuckerberg said, so its use needs to be computer-to-computer for now.

Asked about competitor Google, which last week launched its own social network, Google+, Zuckerberg seemed non-plussed (so to speak). Google+ also has video chat.

"The last five years have been about connecting people; the next five years are about building these apps (to do that)," he said. "What you're going to see are companies -- not just companies like Google" entering that arena.

"Every app is going to be social," he said. "Our job is to stay focused on building the best service for that; and if we don’t, someone else will."

Along those lines, Facebook also introduced two other changes:

Group Chat, "one of our most requeted features," now lets you chat with multiple people at once. "Now you can have conversations with more than one person on the fly for quick group discussion."
New "Chat" design lets you see a sidebar on the screen that shows the friends you message the most, whether those friends or on or offline. "Simply click on a friend to start chatting or send a message."
You can learn even more from Facebook's blog, posted Wednesday by Philip Su, an engineer on Facebook's video calling team.


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