A good news for facebook fans..you can make video calls on facebook… Facebook has just announced a major new feature that it’s launching in tandem with Skype: video calling.
During the product announcement, Mark Zuckerberg described how his elderly neighbor in Palo Alto asked if he could to video chat his grandson on Facebook — without the hassle of setting up a new account or downloading a program. “Tune in,” Zuckerberg told him.
he also said that Facebook has hit a record 750 million users. The new service, rolling out from Wednesday, 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 Groupon 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 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.”
In a phone interview later on Wednesday, 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.
