In the beginning of last week, there had been a lot of speculation about the new service to be launched by Facebook.
It has now been confirmed, that that service was the launch of Video chat, in conjunction with Skype.
This launch will now make video calling available to all of Facebook’s 750 million users, and will give a wider user base to Skype.
The cooperation between Facebook and Microsoft can also be expected to increase as Skype has recently been bought over by Microsoft.
While people may speculate that Facebook has launched this service as a counter attack to the launch of Google Plus, it is quite obvious that Facebook must have been planning and discussing this deal with Skype for quite some time. The timing may just be coincidental.
As of now, the video chat function is only available on the desktop. Mobile users may have to wait a while for this service. There has been no information about this service being made available on the mobile in the near future.
It also remains to be seen how popular video chat becomes in the near future. It is quite possible that a large number of users may consider video chat as an intrusion of privacy, unlike communication in the form of text messaging.
