Wednesday, July 06, 2011
FACEBOOK ANNOUNCEMENT
Facebook announced today that Skype will be integrated into Facebook for real-time video chat.
It will require only clicking a call button to connect to a friend. If the Skype App is not already downloaded, it will start-up in about a minute or less.
It is not clear if it will work yet on mobile phones.
The announcement also included improvements in Groups and in the layout -- on wide-screen monitors only-- of Friends available for Chat.
Underlying this announcement was an important statement of Facebook's vision of the future:
The most important trends they see are (in this order):
1- the integration of new Apps that will take advantage of the infrastucture and large community of users on Facebook
2- the roll-out of features to mobile tablets & smart-phones
3- Groups.
Also very interesting was the fact that the announcement was LIVE on full-screen streaming video. It looked great! It was almost like being there (except for the networking, and they did not use the new Skype feature to allow questions from the Internet in the Q&A).
Labels: FACEBOOK, Skype, Video chat
