World’s largest social networking site Facebook has announced by the end of June about its partnership with Skype, the software application for making free internet audio and video calls. One should notice that this announcement comes at a point when Facebook’s rival Google announced the release of its latest version of social network “Google plus”.
Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s teaming with Skype was discussed last year. He also revealed that it is not the first time they have teamed up. These two already share instant messaging tools. The launch of live video chat on Facebook would revamp the competition it has with the other networking sites like Google Plus and Apple Inc.’s features on the tablet iPads and iPhones. The founder also said that it would enhance how people communicate in more ways and stay in touch.
Facebook already has 750 million users compared to 500 million last year. It goes on to show the way people want to connect and enjoy sharing between friends on the site. The amount of sharing is also an indication of how people are engaged with the site. There were also reports that the major shareholder of Facebook, Microsoft agreed to buy Skype in May allowing Facebook to grow even more closer to Microsoft.
Skype’s vice president and general manager at consumer Neil Stevens said that it was going to be a long term relationship between Skype and Facebook. He mentioned that it was not a one shot deal. The implementation of the product was a strategically prepared deal. This social deal will be able to connect only two people face to face at launch. But they are considering adding more features such as multi video chat facility as well.
This one-on-one video calling would be largely compared to newly released Google Plus’ group video calling facility known to be “Hangouts”. This allows up to ten people to chat at the same time. Both Facebook and Google are battling it out in the social arena though analysts still speculate the future of Google plus considering Google’s previous online efforts going for a toss.
But the latest news coming from social media is that Google has bagged the Lion’s share of attention. This only shows up the war is not going to end any time soon in the social arena.
While one in every nine people have Facebook accounts today, the integration of Facebook with Skype would allow more number of video calls. Video calls in Skype accounted for more than 41 percent of the entire web calling last year in October.
It is likely to shoot up to a greater level of percentage as their tie up gives them a lot of new audience and a definite platform to cater to a larger group. As Facebook active users are going up day by day, its merging with Skype would benefit both the companies, analysts from major social media sites reveal. The war has just started and only time will decide the future of these two ventures.
What would you prefer for video calling: Facebook video calls or Google+ hangouts?