Facebook Video Chat and Skype

By ChatRooms.NET - 2011-07-17

Facebook is now offering to everyone a new service that enable their members to video chat.

The new service came about after Facebook and Microsoft who bought Skype for $8.5 billion dollars arrived to an agreement to put the Skype video chat application into Facebook.

Facebook's new Video Calling service is powered by Skype; perhaps because of that, it's simple and straightforward to use. You'll first need to download a plug-in by going to www.facebook.com/videocalling, clicking on the Get Started button, then on the Setup button. At that point, you'll download and install a Java plug-in.

Positive usage of this new offering, people can now talk to their friends in a more personal manner. One to one business discussions can now be done via Facebook (although people has been using Skype before to discuss business matters).

Google has also recently launched Google+, the new social networking site offering of Google, and it comes with Hangout - the video chat application of Google+. Facebook's video chat is currently more stable, requires fewer system resources, and has higher-quality video and audio. On the other hand, Google+ Hangout is a more fully featured application, clearly designed for group video chat.

Facebook Video Chat needs more improvement.

One of which is it should be able to have multiple video chatting capability. As it is right now it's designed for one-on-one only. If you try to connect to a Facebook user already involved in a video chat, you'll be told that they're not available; you can leave a video message if you like.

Second, you can't use Facebook video to converse with Skype users who aren't on Facebook and there's no way to make a video call between Facebook and Gmail users, Google+ users or Apple (AAPL) FaceTime users.

Video calling will be available soon at http://www.facebook.com/videocalling so you can call your friends right from Facebook Just click the call button at the top of your friend's profile or chat window.

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