Enthusiastically pre-hyped by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week, the new “awesome” add-on to the social networking site has been revealed as video chat tool created in partnership with Skype.
Facebook’s new video chat service will let users make face-to-face calls, although at launch only two people can join in with the chat – making it look rather less than ‘awesome’ compared to the group video calls available in Google’s rival Google+ service.
“Video calling is the first example of what we think of as a great social app,” insisted Zuckerberg during a press event at the company’s Palo Alto, California HQ.
“The integration that we’ve done could not have been done without the great social infrastructure we’ve rolled out over the last five years,” he added.
Redesign
The new chat tool is based on Facebook’s existing Groups set up, with a site redesign adding a browser sidebar providing quick access to those you chat to most often, plus a “call” button to fire up the video service.
Pesky plug in required
Annoyingly, anyone wanting to use the new service will be forced to install a plug-in – another less than awesome feature in our book.
