Facebook Announces Group Chat, Video Calling Backed by Skype [Google+ vs Facebook]
In case you aren’t watching, Facebook’s own Mark Zuckerberg is giving a briefing to press where he’s announcing the next bits of growth for his social networking juggernaut. They highllighted three things they wanted to introduce after noting that they see 4 billion pieces of content shared across Facebook every day: group chat, an improved design and video calling. I think you already know where I’m going with this.
The first and last bits are what we want to focus on here, particularly because these are some of the same things Google just announced for their new social networking platform, Google+. I was just discussing with my friends how Facebook likely already has many of these features in motion, but are sitting on them until any of the folks on their short list of direct competitors introduce them.
Well, Google+ is one of those direct competitors. Video calling? Check. Group chats? Hello, Huddles. And more than Google+ was introduced with these features, they’re nothing new at all. Group chatting has been part of Google Talk for quite some time. More recently, video calling has also been available. Google has sat on and refined these two features before introducing them in Google+, and it seems to have paid off.
I say that because Facebook’s video calling feature is only two-way. It’s just you and another person. The only way more than two people can video chat is if they have someone else in the room. With Google+, you can “Hangout” and video call with up to ten of your friends. It’s interesting to note that Facebook’s video calling feature is driven by Skype, a company now owned by Microsoft. That creates an interesting dynamic considering Google is directly competing with Microsoft in many different avenues.
All of that adds up to make it sound like Facebook was feeling the heat and needed to respond with the goods. Many Google+ users (Google+ers?) feel like the only thing holding it back from giving Facebook a run for its money is the fact that they can’t easily convert their friends. While the jury is still out on how much damage G+ can do to Facebook once Google refines the experience and opens it up to all, Facebook clearly wasn’t going to wait to find out.
So the race is on, folks – Facebook has finally met their first true competitor and they’re responding to the challenge. It’ll be hard to dethrone them at this point, but the fact that Facebook has responded so promptly to Google’s new project shows that they know Google has the best shot out of everyone to accomplish it. This war will be quite interesting going forward.