Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces a partnership with Skype today at his company's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET )Facebook will introduce several improvements to its little-used video chatting feature, the most significant being a partnership with Skype, the social network’s executives, including co-founderMark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday.
Zuckerberg and his colleagues said that their aim had been to make the video calling feature as simple to use as possible. Users will be able to call their friends with a single click either from within Facebook chat, or directly from their friends' Facebook pages.
The calls will require the one-time download of a piece of software within the browser, which they claimed would take a matter of seconds, and which launches automatically immediately after it is downloaded.
The deal is seen as a boost to Microsoft, which is an investor in Facebook and is in the midst of purchasing Skype for $8.5 billion.
In making the announcement, Facebook also said it has reached 750 million users worldwide. The partnership will no doubt quickly boost Skype’s user base, which is at 170 million.
Zuckerberg promised that today's announcement was just one of many coming up from the site over the next weeks and months, some of which would also be partnership with pre-existing apps - leading to much speculation about what else they have up their sleeve.
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