What's 'awesome' about Skype video-chat on Facebook?

In the social media ‘arms race’ between Google and Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has been promising to launch “ something awesome ” ever since the search company launched Google+ on June 28.

Tech blogs speculated that the “something awesome” might be Skype-powered video chat, or perhaps an iPad or mobile app.

The big reveal came on Wednesday, and some of those tech bloggers weren’t far off. Facebook did indeed announce Skype-integrated video chat, as well as a group chat instant messaging feature, and a redesign so that it’s easier to see who’s online and available to chat. Facebook said that these features would be rolled out immediately.

An inflection point

Zuckerberg began the livestreamed announcement by setting the stage for the social media company’s new applications. He argued that the era of building social networks was over. Instead, the next five years would be dedicated to building social components to existing businesses, applications, and services on top of social networks like Facebook.

As Zuckerberg said during the product launch:

Social networking is at this inflection point now, right? If you think about what social networking meant for the last five or seven years since Facebook has been around, the narrative has mostly been around connecting people. … Whenever people write about Facebook or social networking it’s always, “Oh, there’s this new way that people are being connected.” … Until the last couple of years, I think most people really had open questions about whether soc networking was going to be this widespread, ubiquitous phenomenon in the world. … I think that chapter is pretty much done at this point. …

I actually think the driving narrative for the next five years or so is not going to be about wiring up the world because a lot of the interesting stuff has actually been done. It’s about what kind of cool stuff you’re going to be able to build and what kind of new social apps you’re going to be able to build now that you have this wiring in place, this kind of social infrastructure. …

As we look around the industry and talk to different folks, companies that are really best in class in whatever the do-games, music, communications, any industry that you can really think of, search-are thinking about you know, “How are we going to offer our product and do it in a social way on top of a social infrastructure?”

The skinny on the new stuff

Zuckerberg noted that half of Facebook users are utilising the ‘groups’ function. So, to allow for more ad hoc group interactions, Facebook introduced group chat, which allows users to create and organise a chat with multiple people spontaneously without having to create a new group every time. For friends who are included in the group chat but who aren’t online when the discussion takes place, a summary will be sent to them via Facebook.

The site also got a bit of a resdesign to make it easier to find friends who are online. For example, a new sidebar tool will allow users to find people who they chat with the most.

But the big news was the Skype partnership, which allows users to video chat with a Facebook friend with a simple click of a “call” button on the top right side of the screen. Video calling can also be accessed through a chat. And Facebook friends that don’t already have Skype accounts will be able to download the application in about 20 seconds.

Facebook’s focussed philosophy

Zuckerberg said the collaboration with Skype was “symbolic” of Facebook’s philosophy of focussed future growth. He also seemingly took a swipe at Google’s broader approach.

Zuckerberg said:

We believe that the social infrastructure is so important to the way this industry is going to develop that that’s the part that we want to focus on and we want to leave all of the different types of apps, or as much as possible, to independent entrepreneurs and companies that are going to be best in class at building those things. And that’s a really different strategy, if you think about it, than the strategy of a lot of the other major internet companies out there that try to do everything themselves.

We just have this belief at Facebook, partially validated with the success we’ve had with the platform so far, that independent entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs that focus on one specific type of thing will always do better than a company that’s trying to do a million things, and that’s what we’re banking on.

We’re going to build a social ecosystem where we build the infrastructure and we’re years ahead in wiring up, and we’re going to enable all these other folks to build world-class apps on top of that that are really going to define how we use software for the next five years.

But is it awesome?

As someone who already uses Skype, I’m not sure I needed Facebook to facilitate my video calls, so I’m a bit lukewarm. It could be convenient for connecting spontaneously with Facebook friends. The biggest winner here seems to be Skype, which will undoubtedly grow its user base thanks to the social networking site.

But it does seem that Google has already beaten Facebook to the punch anyway with Google+ and its “hangout” feature, which allows users to video chat with many people at once.

When Ben Parr of Mashable asked about this at Wednesday’s announcement, Zuckerberg said that group video calls could be on the horizon.

But he also punted:

As far as the Google stuff goes…In terms of the narrative I was saying earlier where the last five years have been about connecting people and now that you have that social infrastructure in place, the next five years are about building these apps. I think that what you’re going to see is a lot of companies that have not traditionally looked at social networking in their apps, not just comp like Google… Netflix is a good example that comes to mind, and they’ve talked publicly about how they’re trying to really do social stuff well and they haven’t traditionally done social stuff but now that there’s this social infrastructure in place, I just think you’re going to see all these companies build on top of that. …

I view a lot of this as validation that this is the way that the next five years are going to play out. … Every app is going to be social, and I just think our job is to stay focussed on building the best service for that and if we do that, then there’s a massive market and a lot of value to be built in the world.

What’s your take on these new Facebook apps and Zuckerberg’s read of the industry? Awesome or not?