Facebook Announces Free Skype Video Chat Support; Google+ Smirks At It

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Last week we found out that Mark Zuckerberg and Co. have an awesome project to reveal, and soon after the rumors started to spread out saying that Facebook and Skype will begin sitting in a tree soon when it comes to video chat support.

Well it looks like all those rumors were true and Facebook did announce today that its users will soon be able to video call each other as the company is working closely with Skype to provide the new service.

In other words you’ll be able to talk to any of your friends straight from Facebook and see them at the same time thanks to Skype’s video calling capabilities that are now built right into Facebook. Naturally all of it will be available free of charge. You won’t need to sign up for a Skype account anymore, and you won’t have to convince any of your friends to get a Skype account to make calls and video calls.

This new Facebook feature will certainly be appreciated by some Facebook users, and I’m sure that Skype and its new patron, Microsoft, are also happy to extend their customer base to up to 750 million users, and counting. Sure not all of them will become paying Skype customers, but it’s definitely great exposure for the VoIP service.

Video calling will be available in the following weeks, but you can try it now if you desperately need to compare it to Google’s Google+ Hangouts feature. At the end of the day Google will win this moral battle in my book, and, as amazing this video chat feature may be for Facebook, it’s still Google that introduced it first as part of a social network. Of course that doesn’t mean Facebook’s video calling is worse than Google’s, but we’ll call that bridge once we get there. And while we’re at it, we could also compare Facebook’s video calling feature with Apple’s FaceTime, although FaceTime is not really part of any social network, so that’s why Facebook’s new service should be compared to Google’s Hangouts rather than FaceTime.

Besides introducing video calling integration, Facebook made other minor changes to its chatting service. You can now see the friends you message most, create group chats, and hold on to the history of the conversation for future reference. But video calling is what takes the cake today.

Anyone excited or not over Skype video calling inside Facebook? Tell us more about it on our very own Facebook wall!