Facebook Said To Resume Talks With Skype 58
An anonymous reader writes "You may soon be able to start a Skype video call with your friends on Facebook. The latest rumor suggests that Facebook and Skype have resumed talks about integrating the video conferencing technology on the social network. The two companies first talked about a potential partnership in September 2010, but they could not reach an agreement. When Skype 5.0 was released in October 2010, the new version offered voice calling between Facebook friends, but it did not include a video chatting feature."
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
If I want to talk to my friends, I'm going to just call them. I'm certainly not going to login to a website and send messages through a proprietary system to them. And I'm *certainly* not going to login to the website, find their page or find them in some contact list, then call them via skype. Instead, I'm going to . . . you know, pick up the fucking phone.
Besides, Skype isn't in keeping with the spirit of Facebook. Facebook (like all social networking) is NOT about one on one communication. Social networking sites are all about "I AM SO IMPORTANT... I AM **SO** IMPORTANT . . . . that I can't be bothered to let the people important to me in y life know about things or talk with them. Instead, I'm going to broadcast it to the entire world so I can put in the least amount of effort and personal interaction to accomplish telling EVERYONE on earth about X, Y, and Z. . ."
The only way this would keep in spirit with facebook is if it only broadcast everything you said via Skype into some massive 1,200 person distribution list that they can then *listen* to.
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Well for once i would sure love an alternative to Mr. Bloaty ak.a. Skype. That thing takes a ton of memory and is prone to bugging out and pegging one of my cores at 100% use...
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Had this same problem, Turns out you have XP compatibility mode on when you're in windows vista/seven, I did this because they removed the "feature" to pretty much make it go onto your task bar icons when you click the close icon.
I did something drastic (google) and many people complained, and said that it was because of the compatibility mode, sure enough once I turned that off, I stopped getting 3 cores being maxed out, and it doesn't use more then 60MB of ram! Woah!
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
You do realise that people use Skype precisely because there are situations in which it is impractical or uneconomical to use a regular old phone line? The people who use Facebook to communicate to overseas relatives would probably be very happy to give Skype their money and make a voice call if they only knew it existed.
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Yes, yes, that is all fine. But why do you need Facebook for that ?
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Who said you did?
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You're being deliberately obtuse. Here are some of the possible benefits I can think of immediately:
Keep this line for later, yo
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Yeah, this is true.
I was wondering if people knew more than I did because I don't really use Facebook.
But I guess it is mostly convience, no double administration and less setup time.
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If one's main concern is cost, then regular VoIP (the open kind, with competition and all) wins hands down.
E.g: http://progx.ch/home-voip-prixbetamax-3-1-2.html [progx.ch]
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I'm not sure how you can reason that Skype isn't in competition with those services. Unless you have a different sense of "competition" than I.
A perfect storm of lock-in (Score:3)
The lock-in of Facebook combined with the lock-in of Skype. Poor Average Joes are going be stuck on them forever. Good thing I never put any personal info into Skype, I'm sure Facebook would love to make me a profile based on my Skype info.
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That also isn't the spirit of Facebook, anyone can use it how they want to. Facebook just provides the tools. Personally I don't have any people on my friends that spam mindless shit (or I have hidden them from my wall) and most people also use the facebook chat feature for one to one conversation. They've even stopped logging in to MSN Messenger because everyone they know is on Facebook anyway (I have inter
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Why? becauise Skype to Skype is free, anywhere in the world, anytime of day. Your phonecall to your freind in ObscureCountry at peak time won't be free.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you can't think of a good reason to use it, doesn't mean anyone else can't think of a reason to use it.
You further display a remarkable amount of ignorance as to the platforms actual usage. I'm sure some people use it worthlessly, just like Twitter, but it is also a meaningful way to communicate and share what interests you. It, in fact, lets you know some people better than you otherwise might, and can be used to have interesting conversations both online and offline.
I don't understand why people have such a hate on for social networking, as if it "doesn't count" or whatever. It's just another way to communicate. It's damn convenient for showing the world what you care about - and I'm sure you think that people just lie, but that's just not true. Friends like that, are not friends - they are enemies. Why would you be friends with a liar or deceiver in real life?
Also, let us not forget that the advent of the telephone brought about fears of people never seeing each other due to the incredible ease of calling someone.
Some people, of course, use it wrong or annoyingly - those people are ignored. This shit ain't hard, people.
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My sentiments exactly. To doubt the potential of a technology simply because, "Well, uh...I don't need it" doesn't mean it's useless for everyone else.
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I have a fair number of friends who I met via the Internet. I don't know their phone numbers. Voice chat rocks.
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I hate this about facebook, it seems my sister who planned to come over to our house, had already cancelled the trip to come over because of x y z, but had posted it on facebook, and did not bother calling me to cancel....I do not have facebook, and found out from another family member that she updated her postings and was not coming, and I thought, what the f*ck...seriously, what little respect people have, you are that too busy, you can not even be bothered to properly confirm a cancellation....that was t
priorities (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd love to see Skype come out with a supported, up to date version of their client for Linux first. Oh, and also, not to drop my calls as often. Et cetera.
Mustard/ gravy is a nice to have, but not very useful when the steak and potatoes aren't already on the plate.
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If you're going to switch to something unpopular, use SIP. It's the Linux of the VoIP world. Totally open and clearly superior (however with a few technical gotchas), but unpopular because an easy-to-use but inferior and closed commercial product made it to Average Joe's desktop first.
Google Chat is basically just a Skype clone from Google. I haven't used the desktop clients, my N900's communications suite just has support for it when I log in with my Google account.
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I'd love to see Skype come out with a supported, up to date version of their client for Linux first.
I want a pony.
But Facebook brings 700 million users to the table.
Careful what you wish for (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that the "up to date" Skype client is a horrible piece of adware/nagware, while the old one is just a nice quiet application? Be careful what you wish for.
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As I recall, the latest Linux Skype client has been version Skype 2.1 Beta 2 for Linux [skype.com] for well over a year now, with no sign whatsoever of it progressing any further. Then again, I'm not too bothered about that, as newer Windows versions I have used have all been more bloated then previous ones with no appreciable additional functionality worth speaking of.
XMPP to skype? (Score:3, Interesting)
Since facebook uses XMPP, this would mean that they would create a gateway between skype and XMPP.
This would be frikkin awesome since then I could finally dump skype.
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I really don't see that being the outcome. The Skype stuff will probably just be in parallel to the XMPP stuff. In fact, I wouldn't put it past Skype to try and get Facebook to shut down the XMPP stuff so more users have to use Skype clients to even text chat outside of the Facebook website. Big companies like walled gardens and proprietary protocols.
What I'd have much preferred to have seen would be a XMPP-video based feature, a-la Google's GMail/XMPP Jingle video. Incidentally, does anyone have any idea w
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Because Google hasn't properly updated the Google Talk client in years and is trying to phase it out in favour of Gmail's chat client.
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Yeah, I'd pretty much figured that was the case as well. A shame, as it's much more practical to have an application sitting in the system tray than a browser tab/window hogging tab bar/taskbar space.
I'm Not Sure... (Score:2)
I like how Facebook is adopting "new" technologies so people can better connect with each other, but I'm not sure I want it as the standard for everything on the internet. I think there are some improvements you can make to a universal online, profile system like Facebook. I mean, at some point, there's gonna be clashes between your image and anonymity, because of all the integration. Is Facebook going to be that image? Eh...I certainly hope not. But it almost seems for certain that anonymity is in many res
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At the risk of overstretching an analogy, people used to plug everything into their light socket because they got electricity for the lightbulbs (facebook) and other useful applications for electricity began to appear later (???) which they needed to plug them in somewhere. (?facebook connect?).
I think "at the risk of" should've read "quite absolutely certainly".
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Yea, I sort of got carried away there. Maybe just a tad.
Google must be quaking on its boots (Score:3)
I've been on the waiting list for google's phone service for ages because its not available on my country. With something like this it will make Facebook even more widespread and convenient for regular folks and it will make it even harder for google to compete 'socially'. I know lots of people still think that the goog is unbeatable and can't be unseated but Facebook is making all the right moves and all the right noises, and they are expanding their tentacles outside of their walled garden.
A lot of commentators seem to think that all they want is to suck content and people inside Facebook but these kind of partnerships and integrations such as their comment board initiative will help them spread and break outside of their own realm as well.
Thank heavens for the progress in speech-to-text.. (Score:3)
lolll...although I suppose your Skype calls might be the exception-to-the-Facebook-rule, and so be kept private...but being a gambling man, that wouldn't be the wager I would make. Not when I consider the size of the forces that want to ensure that the 'net is never considered to be a common carrier...and not when Facebook seems to be willing to make a buck for Zuck from all of the rest of your "confidential you hope" data.
Alternatives (Score:1)
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of course it will play out like this... (Score:2, Insightful)
1st month: it's discovered any one of your FB friends can initiate a video call (which is conveniently automatically "accepted") leading to hilarity as someone you don't know now can see you in your skivvies.
2nd month: it's discovered that your FB friends (and their friends) can play with the URL bar to get access to your call history and, in some cases, play back phone calls. Which are, of course, recorded and passed through filters counting the number of times you say Bieber, restaurant and Google.
3rd mon
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I realize you're probably trolling/spamming, but even in a world with a fully-decentralized mesh Internet free of corporate or government control, stupid idiots would still use it to access awful privacy-destroying locked-in services like Facebook. The freedom is for the geeks to enjoy, most people want to be spoon-fed a Just Works solution :-(
If you hate Facebook, you should be promoting something like Diaspora.
Also the HSMM-MESH project is much further along than Freedom Box. If the Freedom Box guys want
Skype update for Linux? (Score:3)
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(we don't all use that hideous brown Linux version).
Ubuntu's a nice OS once you un-fuck the GUI.
Or Skype library (Score:2)
Or at least, as they promised, feature a library handling the skype specific stuff behind closed doors (protocols, protocol-level encryption, etc.) and let all the rest (GUI, Audio/Video Input/Output, desktop integration, etc.) be handled by 3rd party clients with plugins tapping into said library ?
Jaded Early Adopter == Roll your own cloud. (Score:2)
Local communities were established and people "belonged" to many BBSes (not one provider).
My family participated in the "beta" of the Prodigy Online [wikipedia.org] Computer + Network all in one box.
I looked at its' GUI and thought -- Meh, my ASCII BBS may not have a client program, but some of my door games do, and I can't even use the computer for anything else, this is too restricted to succeed.
When the Internet came, I had a portal for my users on the