06 July 2011

Facebook Launches Video Chat With Skype
Talk To Friends Around The World From Facebook

Facebook’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg announced a video calling feature that will be provided by Skype during a press conference at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters.

Video chat has been around for years now, but it's still not an everyday activity for most people. Sometimes it's too difficult to set up, or the friends you want to talk to are on different services and therefore the two companies have teamed up to launch the new highly-anticipated feature which will allow its users to talk to each via video.

So a few months ago, Facebook's developers started working with Skype to bring video calling to Facebook. They built it right into chat, so all your conversations start from the same place. To call your friend, just click the video call button at the top of your chat window.

The new chat feature will show up on Facebook as a "call" button at the top of every user's profile page. By clicking that button, Facebook users can talk to each other over webcams. That feature has already been rolled out to some users and will continue to become available to others, the company said.

For those of us who have been working on this, it's particularly exciting to bring video calling to over 750 million people. We're making this available in over 70 different languages, so friends can stay in touch all over the world.

This is "the world's easiest one-click way" to chat over video, Facebook engineer Philip Su said at a press conference Wednesday. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, took subtle jabs at the new Google network, saying Facebook provides the best way for people to organize their friends into groups -- with minimal effort.

"If you think about it, it makes it so that your networking community can do the work of organizing your communities for you. You don't have to curate," he said.

He also defended the company's one-on-one video chat. "The vast majority of video chat is one-on-one chat. ... I just think this is super-awesome," Zuckerberg said.

There is also new chat design which now includes a sidebar that lists the people you message most. Now it's easier to find your friends and start a conversation. The sidebar adjusts with the size of your browser window, and it automatically appears when the window is wide enough.

They're also launching multi-person chat, which is one of our most requested features. Now when your friends can't figure out what movie to see, you can just add them to a chat and decide together. To include more friends in your conversation, simply select Add Friends to Chat.