Facebook Launching Something “Awesome” Next Week– Is It Facebook Video Chat?
Posted by Eli Blumenthal
You may have heard recently about Google’s big new Facebook competitor, Google+, and how it looks to take everything you currently do on Facebook and make it even more social by connecting you with all your Gmail/Google account friends.
With new features like Circles (creating groups out of all your friends for easier organizing and communicating like say family, classmates or friends from camp. Now you can post updates for just certain people to see instead of your whole Friend’s list), Huddle (think of this like Group Text on the T-Mobile Samsung Sidekick 4G and myTouch 4G Slide— its group texting to your Circles from your phone or computer that should make figuring out what you’re all doing later a lot easier), and most importantly, Hangouts, Google+ looks to be the first real rival to Facebook. Hangouts is the real big thing here and allows for video chats with specific friends or Circles right from your phone/computer— something we all know has been badly missing from Facebook over the last few years.
And while Google+ is right now only in a very limited beta (or testing, not yet ready for everyone) stage, it looks really good and could finally be something that really threatens Facebook for your social networking attention. Facebook of course isn’t taking this new threat without a fight back and has sent out invites for an event next Wednesday, July 6th, where they promise they’ll be launching something “awesome.” And what is this rumored new “awesome” feature? Well if these latest rumors are to be believed (and we believe them) then next week we’ll finally see Facebook video chat thanks to a partnership with Skype.
To us this all makes perfect sense. Facebook needs to steal some of the buzz around Google+ before it grows any larger and what better way to do that then by partnering with one the largest providers of video chat in the world in Skype (oh, and Microsoft– who also is a big rival of Google– is a big investor in Facebook and just so happens to now own Skype).
Again, Facebook hasn’t said exactly what they’ll be announcing next week (some rumors are it’ll be an iPad app or some better photo uploading from phones), but we wanna know: what do you want to see from Facebook next week? Would you use a new Facebook/Skype video chat over iChat, Google Talk, ooVoo or whatever other video chat app you use? Let us know in the comments.
Posted on July 1, 2011, in Computers, Facebook, Rumors and tagged facebook, facebook chat, facebook video chat, Google, google plus, Microsoft, Rumors, skype, social network, social networking, teens. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.
I like the idea of facebook video chat…that’s seems like the most “awesome” thing they could do right now…