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Facebook, Skype Getting Really Friendly
cgriffin21 writes "Facebook and Skype are reportedly in talks over a deal that would integrate Skype calling capabilities into Facebook user accounts. Such an agreement would give both Skype and Facebook not only a leg up on rival VoIP and social networking services from the likes of Google, but also the combined force of two Internet-based services beloved by consumers. The talks, which were reported by All Things Digital on Wednesday, stem from Facebook's goal of merging IP communications and social networking communities more closely together. Facebook in recent weeks had also been rumored to be developing a mobile device of its own."
Oh you said consumers. Carry on then.
I'll leave it to someone else to do the Princess Bride thing?
In Soviet Russia, skype and facebook consume YOU!
I wonder what impact this might have on magic jack. I've used that service far more than any other type of online communications. It also has a nice feature of letting me take it oversea's and as long as i have a high speed connection, i can still make any phone calls back to north america for free.
About as much as Friendster, Myspace, Orkut, and Tribes and Geocities were I guess..
If this trend continues interest in disco music will continue to sky-rocket!
One more reason to dump skype for a truly private VoIP solution. Still waiting..
OMG- Skype and Facebook are now Friends?!
Like!
I haven't checked recently, but what's the status of voip over jabber? We've seeing a lot of collusion and conglomeration between monolithic "walled garden" services, and I think we'll see more of it. The open source community has alternatives, but I'm starting to think we're going to have to step up our game to fight the momentum that the closed systems have.
I think it's positive that Diaspora was able to raise $200k through crowd-sourcing, and I don't agree with people who say it was a waste of money, if only because it showed it was possible. But the reality is that $200k is pennies in comparison to the funds that Facebook, Skype, and others have. And I think it's fair to say that for every talented, idealistic open source programmer willing to work on the side to open the up communication channels, whether it's the web or voip or anything else, there's dozens of talented developers willing to take large salaries to work on proprietary, walled software.
We seem to have solved a lot of the questions that open source brought up when it was first popularized by Linux (management, how to make a profit, etc), but we still have some big questions to ask in terms of how to fund these projects while maintaining independence, and how to compete with well-funded corporations that have an invested interest in keeping things proprietary and walled off. Not just on features, but on user interface and experience, stability, scalability, and other software design concerns.
I don't know if I have any answers, but I'd sure love to hear suggestions. Call it the next big challenge for open source, but we increasingly need to be able to make user-facing software that appeals to the least savvy of users, we need to make it open and flexible, and we need to make it compete with the cycle of new features that come out of proprietary software with massive bank accounts.
--
Appleseed - Open Source, Distributed Social Networking
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/
Twitter and Walmart.
You heard it here first.
Of course, you will still want to have high-priority and low-priority data. So your voice communications data will still be purchased in a different lump than your regular "whenever you get to it" data.
Rod Taylor
Huh? What the fuck is wrong with skype, exactly? Or are you just hating on it by default because it's, like, all popular and mainstream and stuff, maaaan.
I use linux on the desktop and android on my phone. The annoyances skype has provided between those two are so huge I don't know where to start.
Everything will be taken away from you.
This is /., Skype is, dare I say it, I dare, fashionable. /. has a raging hate-on for anything deemed fashionable. Except for being fashionable by hating anything else that's fashionable. That sort of fashionable is A-OK.