Facebook Experimenting With Voice Calling
Last September, news broke that Facebook and VoIP service Skype were about to announce a “deep integration partnership” that would bring integration of SMS and voice chat. A couple weeks later, we got Skype 5., which included an integrated Facebook phonebook …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third act in a slow Skype-Facebook courtship. Skype first dabbled on the platform back in 2007 with Facebook games, then shipped Skype 5 in October 2010 with an integrated Facebook phonebook, and by late November reports had Skype and Facebook weighing a video-chatting partnership. The voice-calling experiment ReadWriteWeb describes remains unconfirmed — but the phonebook inside Skype 5 means the contact layer for such calls already exists.
First-order effects
- If the experiment ships, Facebook users gain voice calling without leaving the site, and Skype gets its paid calling service exposed to Facebook's contact graph rather than its own user base.
Second-order effects
- A working Facebook-Skype voice path puts substitution pressure on carrier SMS and minute-based revenue, since the rumored deal explicitly covers both SMS and voice chat — pushing operators toward flat-rate data plans where their margins are thinner.
Third-order effects
- The deeper pattern: the social graph becoming a communications layer in its own right, with identity-rich platforms routing calls that previously required a phone number — a structure that would eventually make dedicated VoIP clients optional front-ends rather than destinations.
The trend: Social networks are absorbing telephony functions once owned by carriers and standalone VoIP services, with partnerships like Facebook-Skype deciding who owns the call.