Story highlights
Facebook announces a video chatting feature with Skype
Feature begins rolling out on Wednesday
Facebook: We have 750 million users
New video feature is seen as a response to Google+
Palo Alto, California (CNN) – Facebook on Wednesday announced a video calling feature that will be provided by Skype, the well-known Internet video chat program.
The move comes shortly after Google launched a competing social network that also features a video chatting program.
The new chat feature will show up on Facebook as a “call” button at the top of every user’s profile page. By clicking that button, Facebook users can talk to each other over webcams. That feature has already been rolled out to some users and will continue to become available to others, the company said.
This is “the world’s easiest one-click way” to chat over video, Facebook engineer Philip Su said at a press conference Wednesday.
Facebook also announced updates to its text chat features, including a way for users to chat with several of their friends at once. And the company updated the total number of people who are using the site to 750 million.
That move also seems to mirror a feature of Google+, Google’s new social network, which is seen by some as a genuine competitor to Facebook.
A video feature called “Hangouts” lets Google+ users chat over video with several friends at once. The new network also has a feature called “Circles,” which lets people organize their friend lists into groups.
Facebook’s new video feature does not allow for group chats.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, took subtle jabs at the new Google network, saying Facebook provides the best way for people to organize their friends into groups – with minimal effort.
“If you think about it, it makes it so that your networking community can do the work of organizing your communities for you. You don’t have to curate,” he said.
He also defended the company’s one-on-one video chat.
“The vast majority of video chat is one-on-one chat. … I just think this is super-awesome,” Zuckerberg said.
Facebook has grappled with privacy concerns in recent years, and Zuckerberg addressed that in responding to a question about video calling.
“Your video camera is not going to turn on until you accept it [the call],” he said.
Facebook’s CEO may have created challenging expectations for Wednesday’s event when he told reporters last week that the company would be announcing “something awesome.” Some people following along on news sites’ live blogs Wednesday said they were underwhelmed by the news.
