Internet telephony company, Skype is in the news these days for all the right reasons; first it was the revamping of its services and now it is the integration of social networking giant Facebook with Skype. Skype according to the people in the industry is getting more social and fun with the integration of social networking giant Facebook and the added ability to have group video chats.
Skype on Thursday posted on an official video blog in which the company formally announced these changes in a video, posted on its official blog page. Now, the new version of Skype for Windows will include a separate tab for the social networking hub Facebook that will enable the users of Skype to view their news feed as well as they can video chat or voice chat on Skype. The feature of integration will also enable the users to make a voice or a video call to their Facebook friends with just a single click from the embedded tab. But this option requires that the friends to whom the Skype user intend to call must have their number in the Facebook friend list.
Rick Osterloh who is Skye’s head of consumers products in the video blog said that the main essence of the Skype service is to connect and communicate with the people you care and love, it doesn’t matter that who the person is that you are connecting to, whether it’s a friend next door or Mom sitting in other part of the world.
This news of the redesigning of Skype comes a day after when Facebook and the software giant Microsoft announced that they will be working together. Microsoft and Facebook are planning to add Microsoft owned search engine BING as a different package. Bing will add Facebook profiles, news and posts from friends and other features in their search results.
Facebook network director Ethan said in a blog post that Facebook is working with various companies like Skype to make it simple for the users to connect and contact their friends.
The other new feature of group video calling is for the time being available in the beta form as a trial version. The blog post of Skype did not disclose that how much the feature will cost once it is out in the market. According to Osterloh, users on the average consume 520 million minutes on the Skype daily. The video calling feature accounts for almost 40 percent on Skype to Skype traffic. Users can also call the land lines or mobile phones from their Skype account for a certain amount of fee. The new version is available for download on Friday. The new Skype for Mac or Linux will come afterwards.