Facebook to Add Skype Video Chat To Its Pages
Facebook will add Skype video chat to its pages, aiming to
spice up the appeal of the world's No.1 internet social networking service while
fending off increased competition from Google. The agreement, announced
by Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg at the company's Palo Alto, California,
headquarters on Wednesday 6th July, deepens the company's cooperation with Microsoft
Corp, which is in the process of buying Skype to build up its web presence.
Microsoft Corp, which is in the process of buying Skype to build up its web presence.
Zuckerberg said Facebook has hit a record 750 million users. The new service, rolling
out from Wednesday 6th July, could be a huge boost for Skype, which currently has
about 145 million regular users. The partnership comes as competition heats up in
the internet market, with Facebook and Google, as well as fast-growing companies
such as Group on and Twitter, vying for billions of dollars in online advertising
revenue.
By incorporating free video chat directly into its service, Facebook will give its
members another reason to use the site more often and for longer periods of time,
said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. They need to continue to keep their users engaged
and coming back everyday, he said of Facebook. Facebook's Skype service, initially
limited to one-to-one video chat, will be free. Financial details of the deal, if
any, were not disclosed. Tony Bates, Skype's chief executive, said Wednesday's (6th
July) deal with Facebook is only the start of a potentially lucrative partnership.
For us, this makes a lot of business sense, said Bates at the Palo Alto event. We
get huge reach. In the future, we're talking about potentially also having Skype
paid products available within the web format we saw here today.
On Wednesday 6th July, Neil Stevens, the general manager of Skype's consumer business,
said the company was planning on introducing a for-pay service that would allow
users on Facebook to place calls to landline and mobile phones. Stevens said he
could not provide a time frame for when such a service might be available, and said
details about whether the service would work with Facebook's so-called Credits currency
had yet to be worked out. Facebook, which also unveiled a group messaging function,
adding to its existing one-to-one text chat, is returning fire from Google, which
last week turned up the competitive heat by introducing a social networking service
dubbed Google+.
Courtesy: Times of India
