Facebook dials in Skype video calling

Social Network goes VoIPy

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the arrival of video chat, powered by Skype, into the social network.

Speaking via a stream that was broadcast on the Facebook Live channel, Zuckerberg's announcement was actually later than Facebook and Skype publishing the details on their respective blogs, such is Zuck's tendency to waffle on about graphs, trends and the like (he loves a good graph that boy).

Video calling will be available from within Facebook on your browser and Skype claims that it represents its "first big step on the Web".

The Skype video calling is embedded right into Facebook's UI and is an optimised version of the popular VoIP software.

There's no need to have Skype installed on your PC - simply sign into your Facebook chat and select call to video conference with your contacts straight away. It will need to download and install a plug-in first, but this is automatic and simple. You can even leave video messages if your pals aren't around to answer if you're calling them from within Skype (which already has Facebook chat integration).

And the best news is that video calling from Skype and Facebook is available now from www.facebook.com/videocalling.

As well as the video calling addition, Facebook has also added group chat and a new layout so the friends you chat with the most often are more prominent.

With Google+ offering group video chatting with Hangouts and mobile group chatting with Huddle - Facebook's announcement may have come a week too late....but it'll still be useful nevertheless; after all Google has a long way to go before it matches Facebook's 750 million users.

And the magic continues…

You are very familiar with the long story behind iPhone's new operating system 4.0. Multitasking sprung up in the OS 4.0 launch event, while all the do's and don'ts will be clearly defined in the WWDC event, planned on 7^th June, 2010. Event will help to bridge the ends between iPhone app developers and Apple's engineers.

Multitasking was the most desired feature in the iPhone operating system. All the developers and users waited impatiently to see it on the list. The user interface of OS4.0 is amazingly designed with seven different multitasking APIs, including background audio, voice over IP (VOIP), background location, push notifications, local notifications, task completion, and fast app switching. Multitasking adds a new feature in its user interface, which appears to be a widget like thing.

The newly designed user interface of OS4.0 lets you to flick the left of your first window of open apps and there you go with a few new icons on your iPhone screen. The new icons list as motionless iPhone icons to launch the app ASAP, iPhone music controls and Orientation lock. Just a minute! Is it revolution of the mini-widgets to the latest operating system?

The fresh feature orientation lock is just like that on the iPad which for now as an alternative is accessed through this menu. It's fun, tap it once to lock the portrait than tap it again to unlock. Apple has published its third beta version for iPhone OS4.0 and associated Software Development Kit (SDK). In this Apple has published a refinement of their operating system and developer tools initially. The features are easily accessible through a left-swipe from the multitasking "dock" manager.

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Skype Android Update Includes File Transfers, Performance Boost

It's been since September that we looked at the release of a new version of Skype for Android. That time we got support for a bunch of additional smartphones and some UI tweaks. Today Skype's announced the arrival of version 2.6 for Android, bringing with it some enhancements for certain dual-core systems and a new file transfer feature.

If you've got a phone based on NVIDIA's Tegra 2 chip, Skype 2.6 should deliver better battery life thanks to more efficient power handling, as well as improved video quality, taking advantage of the Tegra 2 s processing power.

The addition of built-in file transfer support will let you quickly share pictures, video, or documents with the Skype user with whom you're text chatting, voice calling, or video calling.

Skype's added several new Androids to the video-chat support whitelist; you can always give it a shot on any Froyo or better Android, but Skype keeps track of phones where the feature is known to perform well. Today's additions include the HTC Amaze 4G, Motorola Droid RAZR, and oddly enough, the Droid 4, even though it's yet to be officially announced.

Skype 2.6 is in the Android Market now.