Facebook and Google+'s video chat tools compared
Video chat is the big thing again, at least according to Facebook, which let loose a new video chat service yesterday. Powered by Skype, the new feature lets Facebook users start a video calls with one another while continuing to use the site.
Context & Ripple Effects
The launch caps months of buildup: reports of Skype integrating with Facebook surfaced back in October 2010, a November 2010 story asked outright whether Facebook was preparing video chatting with Skype, and TechCrunch called the timing days ago with its report that an in-browser video chat would arrive that week. Zuckerberg confirmed the collaboration at the announcement, with the product built by the Skype team.
The timing puts this head-to-head with Google+: the CNET piece frames the comparison directly against Google+'s video chat tools, arriving weeks after Google+ debuted Hangouts as a marquee feature. Facebook also arrives at this from a defensive posture — the same week it blocked a Chrome extension exporting friends' data, after privacy stumbles it has had to address, per the article's framing.
First-order effects
- Facebook users can now start one-on-one video calls inside the site without installing a separate client, removing the last step where a conversation leaves Facebook for Skype's own app.
- Skype gains distribution to Facebook's entire user base without spending to acquire those users, while Google+ must answer for Hangouts being matched feature-for-feature by the far larger network.
Second-order effects
- Standalone calling apps lose their moat when the social graph owner bundles the same capability for free, pressuring Skype's own client and any third-party chat tools to differentiate on group features — exactly where Hangouts currently leads.
- Google is pushed to lean harder on Hangouts as Google+'s differentiator, since Facebook just neutralized the simple one-to-one video call as a selling point.
Third-order effects
- Real-time communication is becoming a native layer of social platforms rather than a product category of its own, with the platform holding the friend graph able to absorb point solutions built by partners like Skype.
- If platform-embedded chat keeps winning, communications vendors increasingly survive as infrastructure behind large networks instead of consumer destinations in their own right.
The trend: Social networks are absorbing real-time video calling as a bundled feature, turning one-to-one chat into table stakes and pushing differentiation toward group experiences like Hangouts.