Facebook Video Chat Coming Soon?

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Facebook has recently trademarked the “Face” name for telecommunication services. Now, a snippet of Javascript code reveals that Facebook might soon support video-chatting on the site.

Facebook also earlier announced its social messaging system, which will compete directly with Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail. However, that was mostly for text- and multimedia-based messaging like email. The recently discovered snippets of code on Facebook suggests that they might also be implementing video chatting, a-la Facetime.

The object was called VideoChat, and according to Green Any Site, it appears to include video chatting functionality. The code also suggests that either ActiveX or Skype SDK will be used, which might mean that Facebook is either partnering with Skype, or will be using Skype technology to power their video chat.

Facebook might be currently testing this feature at the moment, since the code does not appear continuously, but on an intermittent basis.

Facebook currently supports instant messaging and messaging, but if can unify email, chat, voice and video under one system, and with its millions and millions of users, it might be a serious challenger to the more established email, video chat and IM platforms like Gmail, Google Talk and Skype.