Go face-to-face on Facebook

The popular site offers free video chats with Skype

Updated 03:55 PM Jul 07, 2011

PALO ALTO (California) - Facebook users will be able to make free video calls to their friends through the site after the social networking giant announced a partnership with the web telephony service Skype.

Rolling out internationally in coming weeks, the widely anticipated feature brings together two of the web's most popular consumer services and is a sign of the way "social apps" will become more prevalent, said Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Mr Zuckerberg introduced the new feature as one of a slate of new sharing and communication tools to be launched in the next few months. "This is symbolic of the way we are going to do these things, building social apps on top of our social infrastructure ... it's only possible because that social infrastructure already exists."

He also announced group chat and a redesigned layout for Facebook chat. The next five years of consumer web, he said, would see companies across many sectors exploit the social infrastructure to make their businesses more social.

"The world generally believes that social software will be everywhere, and it will only be a matter of time before it reaches billions of people, whether through us or someone else," Mr Zuckerberg said at the launch in California. "The driving narrative is not about wiring up the world because a lot of the interesting stuff has been done but about what cool social apps you can build now this social infrastructure is in place."

Skype video calling with Facebook comes just a week after Google launched its Google+, which includes a video chat feature called Hangouts. Mr Zuckerberg took the very public opportunity of playing down Google+.

"I'm not going to talk too much about Google. Lots of companies that have not traditionally looked at social networking apps - not just Google - will be trying apps. I view a lot of this as validation of how the next five years will play out - every app will be social," he said.

"We just have to stay focused on building the best service for that. If we don't, someone else will."

The partnership exploits Facebook's connections with Microsoft. The technology giant invested US$240 million (S$294.9 million) in the firm in 2007 and also acquired Skype in May this year for an estimated US$8.5billion. Skype's chief executive, Mr Tony Bates, said the company had put significant effort into ensuring its own infrastructure would be able to support Facebook's vast userbase, which will boost Skype's own ambition of reaching 1 billion users.

Confirming Facebook's latest monthly user milestone of 750 million people, Mr Zuckerberg quashed speculation that its growth is slowing. "We don't measure the value the internet provides by how many people use the internet but the benefit people are getting, the apps they use and how it is driving the economy," he said, describing the volume of shared content as the primary measure for user activity.

An average 4 billion items, from videos to news stories and recommendations, are shared on Facebook every day. The amount of content being shared has doubled since this time last year and, predicted Mr Zuckerberg, will, double again by next year.

Research firm eMarketer estimates worldwide ad spending on Facebook is expected to reach US$5.74 billion, up 42 per cent over 2011 by 2012. THE GUARDIAN

Source: www.todayonline.com