Overnight Facebook had their ‘something awesome’ announcement, which turned out to be the integration of Skype video calling into Facebook. For years, our Skype and Facebook contact lists have been separate, those two will effectively merge. Given Windows Live Messenger supports Facebook chat, expect those lists to merge as well.
To access Facebook video calling, just use the Facebook chat as you normally would to IM, but you will now see a Call button. After a one time plugin install, you can video call using the Skype back-end. One big advantage of using Facebook is that finding a contact to call is a pretty simple process, something that can’t be said about Skype.
Using Facebook video calling versus installing the Skype desktop client, lowers the barrier to entry, so will you be using it ? No word on whether this will come to Facebook mobile clients, but it would need to, to completely replace the need for Skype apps.
Included in the announcement, was the revelation that Facebook has now reached 750,000,000 users. Three quarters of a billion users.. a pretty amazing number. This is the exciting part for Skype, who will dramatically increasing their user-base. That said there’s no Skype branding, so while the Facebook video calling uses Skype on the back-end, most users won’t know it.
More @ Facebook blog
Start using video calling @ https://www.facebook.com/videocalling
