Slashdot Mirror
Facebook To Launch In-Browser Video Chat With Skype
tekgoblin writes "Facebook will be launching a new in-browser video chat application. 'The product has been built on Skype and will include a desktop component. It’s not clear to me whether that means it will just work if a user has Skype already installed on the computer, or if additional software will need to be downloaded even if the user already uses Skype. But it’s clear that there’s very deep integration between the products, and from the user’s perspective, the product will be an in-browser experience.'"
Now everyone I Skype is going to automatically know who my friends are, where I went to school, and how many Farmville credits I have.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
People seem to use Skype with family and close friends.
People seem to use Facebook with acquaintances.
Their uses are mostly incompatible.
Something tells me that this is going to be a nice feature to have, but that it isn't going to beef up Skype's or Facebook's userbase (as TFA suggests).
Google isn't really a competitor to Facebook. However, Facebook is a competitor to Google, as now people spend lots of time on Facebook and find all kinds of interesting links and stuff there, and maybe even use Facebook's search instead of Google. (yes, I know we techies don't do that, but we're a minority)
What comes to Google+, it's quite far from competitor to Facebook. It just misses so much stuff. There isn't any of those games, apps, fan pages, events.. Maybe some of them will be added to Google+, but on their basic idea of circles I don't think they will do games, apps and (fan) pages. Events and calendar, sure. But don't underestimate those apps on pages on Facebook. Normal people love them. So Facebook and Google+ will probably run side to side, serving slightly different purposes for different people. Just like Facebook and LinkedIn are doing now.
Beta means nothing with Google. Everyone should know that by now. When they announce something going beta, it's pretty much same as going live and they will either improve it over time or forget it (and in some cases completely discontinue offering the service).
I seriously wonder the slashdot group think mentality about this. Usually in these Facebook stories people talk about how they lose their privacy and privacy settings on Facebook are hard to use and most are on by default. You guess what, when I signed up for Google+ today it was ever worse. You talk about Facebook leaking your data to advertisers on Google? Well, Google+ uses that data all over their advertising network and for other tracking. They state this in the very registration page. When you sign up, your profile is by default made public to the whole world, including search engines. There is no way to change that before it has already happened. And this being Google's product, it means the data is indexed in almost real time. Google+ privacy controls are MUCH worse than Facebook's. Only thing I miss in Facebook is the idea of different "circles". They kind of have that with friend groups, but it's not as defined. Otherwise Facebook lets you change any privacy setting as much as you like. I've done so.