Facebook Launches One-Click Video Chat
Skype CEO Tony Bates and Facebook
Chief Mark Zuckerberg
Sarah Lai Stirland
Facebook pulled the wraps off its "awesome" product launch Wednesday, showcasing a new video chat feature that allows users to call anyone in their network without the recipient of the call having to install video software.
When unveiling the service Wednesday morning at Facebook's Palo Alto Headquarters, CEO Mark Zuckerberg placed the emphasis on the ease of use of the new feature -- so easy he said, that even grandparents can use it to initiate calls to their grandchildren online.
"One of the coolest things about this is the way that it works," Zuckerberg said when discussing the new feature.
Users can click on their friends' profiles and call them up, and the person on the other end can install the plug-in and be up and chatting within seconds, he noted.
"It takes them 10 or 20 seconds, and then we're video-chatting," he said. "It's awesome."
"That kind of thing is only possible because this kind of thing already exists, this social infrastructure exists," he said.
The video chat is being powered by Skype, and its development took six months, said Skype CEO Tony Bates at the event.
In addition to video-chat, Facebook has overhauled its "groups" features to allow more spontaneous gatherings of friends into group chats.
Facebook engineer Peter Deng said during the demo that more than half of Facebook's users have started using its group feature since it launched last year.
What was more startling than the product announcement was Facebook's new user numbers. Facebook confirmed that it now has 750 million users. But Zuckerberg downplayed the number during the product announcement, saying that usage patterns, and the utility and value of apps are a fare more important metric.
To that end, he said that Facebook users are sharing things at an "exponential rate," on average sharing double the amount of information they were a year ago.
It's in that context in which he made the launch, saying that the video launch should be seen in light of Facebook being a platform for sharing for companies that hadn't previously thought of putting social networking at the center of their business strategies.
Facebook's announcement comes at the heals of Google launching its Google + social networking product, which makes group features a centerpiece of its strategy.
Google's product also includes a group video "hangout" feature that enables video chatting. The feature has received wide-spread praise.
Hinting at the rivalry, Facebook engineer Philip Su boasted Wednesday:
"This is by far the easiest way to get connected by video -- if it were any easier than this one-click, it would be reading your mind, basically," he said. "This is about the world's largest and best social network, the world's leading provider of video and telephony, and now the world's easiest one-click-way to get connected by video to the ones you care about."
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