Facebook Will Launch In-Browser Video Chat Next Week In Partnership With Skype
techcrunch.com
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Facebook looks to me like they're on the defensive... if FB aren't directly reacting to Google+, I hope they've had time to get the kinks worked out.
This is getting very interesting.
On the other hand, given the invitation only rollout of Google+ it looks more like Google was forced to do something quickly before they were ready. Being first out the gate is a tactic, not a strategy.
As for Facebook having the kinks worked out - with the better part of a billion users they've got the big one solved.
Not sure where you're going here... Facebook and video chat aren't synonymous, so how does having millions of users mean they're going to get it right?
> Google was forced to do something quickly before they were ready
Can you explain why you think Google+ isn't ready? What's "broken"?
The evidence that Google+ wasn't ready to be a Facebook killer is that it is invitation only. Living in a college town, I was around Facebook when it was exclusively for students. Facebook's growth from exclusive to pervasive was enabled by the fact that students move on get married and have babies - looking at pictures of her first granddaughter is what sold Facebook to mom.
On the other hand, the bloggers and programmers invited to Google+ will remain bloggers and programmers. They're already married and have kids and more importantly already update Facebook with photos for grandma and uncles.
Don't get me wrong, Google will make money off this thing even with limited adoption and the assumption that it will ever roll out of perpetual beta (or preview in this case) is not a settled matter based on Google's history.
Google knows the best way to release a product - especially one in unfamiliar territory like the social space - is not to flip a giant switch and hope that when the whole world starts using it, nothing goes wrong. For one, the scalability issues when you're Google are enormous: they know they'll have tens of millions of 7-day users the first 7 days. You don't want to screw that up. That doesn't even touch on product design.
(Also, I'm somewhat confused by the question, as I specifically demonstrated something that is akin to a suggestion by way of demonstrating what Facebook did right... why are you asking this? There are a million ways to do "invite closed communities rather than random people", like allowing Google Apps domains to join rather than people: that way you at least could get "my company/organization circle" or something; you could imagine inviting e-mail domains, so "anyone with ucsb.edu e-mail addresses now gets on", etc.: the problem is that I now know a small handful of my friends who are using Google+, but as most of my friends can't I will rapidly tire of posting there when I can post to Facebook.)
That's evidence that Google's technical people aren't insane. You don't just throw open the doors to a project of this size. The technical implications of going from zero to millions of users on a new service are huge.
Not this guy. I'm not putting stuff on Facebook, I have started putting stuff up on G+, and have invited my non-geek friends and family to join.
I doubt this is actually Facebook's answer to Google+ most likely something they've had on the cards for a while. They've still got plenty of time whilst G+ is in it's infancy.
I don't think that Facebook/Skype is a response to Google+'s rollout. I think Google+ is a tactical response to a strategy has been developing for a long time (measured in internet years).
On the other hand, Facebook's announcement probably is a tactical response to Google's timing given the massive investment in buzz creation which has manifested itself in the last few days.
But now, with the prospect of doing 'deep' integration with Facebook, your bet seems very prescient. Even if it was non-intentional, i.e. if you guys had no idea that Google would release Hangout, but talk about great timing.
If Microsoft can successfully integrate Skype into Facebook and expand their userbase even 2X, that's kinda staggering given the baseline number of 130 million they would be starting from.
All of a sudden the price seems like a bargain, if they can pull off something like this.
They could connect FaceTime with either Facebook/Microsoft/Skype or Google+ to give either a lot more penetration in the non-tech US market.
More likely, they will just ignore both and just keep doing their own thing.
Google+ is in a pretty similar position - I chat with people all the time via Google Chat, and if there's video, I can use the same interface with a very low barrier to entry - I already talk to people every day using it. An Apple-only video protocol, by contrast, is basically just a tech demo for most practical applications. Unless you refuse to talk to people who don't own Apple products.
Especially since Apple decided to replace Facebook Auth with Twitter Auth for native iOS integration, I think we can disqualify that relationship at this point.
Personally, I've used FaceTime twice: Once when it first came out to try it out, and once more this week (4 months later) to surprise my girlfriend while I'm travelling because I know she had FaceTime installed on her Macbook and it pops up unexpectedly when you call.
Do other people use FaceTime a lot?
After visiting family in another state, they also picked up a FaceTime-compatible device (iPad 2) to easily videochat with my family back home.
The fact that you DON'T have to create an account (other than your Apple ID) or maintain "status" (a la IM) makes it much friendlier for my Luddite-inclined friends and family.
This is an excellent pairing and will make it even harder for Google+ to get the non-HN crowd types off of FB. Great play, i'd say.
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/So_simple,_your_mother_co...
As didactic as that comment was, I suppose I could have said grandpa. I did use grandma, however, because I don't personally have any grandpas on my facebook, and in my own experience (and evidenced from this link) there are many more grandmas than grandpas on facebook:
http://www.kenburbary.com/2011/03/facebook-demographics-revi...
Even then, however, I disagree that saying "grandma" in such a context is really that damaging. Maybe there's some point to this, but it seems unnecessarily politically correct to me.
Gmail has also been offering a cross-platform "Google Voice & Video Chat" for some time now. Hangout will probably be a rebranded version extended to include video conference support.
"I know too many people who..." - this is not comment that adds anything new or interesting to discussion, it has 0 value to me or anyone here but if you provide valuable info about problems you see in Skype's technology or quality and how is G+ better, that + your honest opinion would be appreciated.
My parents use Skype to talk to my grandparents in Russia weekly; I use it at times as well. I'm grateful for the technology. That said, it's not nearly as seemless (for me) as the phone, even beyond issues of finicky hardware (I'm on Linux, I don't expect much there): phone calls drop, frames stutter or disjoin from the audio, sound might warp, and so on. These are all things that sound like software issues (yeah, my pipe is only so big, but one could degrade more gracefully). I'm just hoping competition can improve things a bit, in a way that giving Skype even more of a stranglehold on the market would not.
(Or, y'know, whatever the translation of "awesome" into teenage girl at the moment.)
Now, if you ask about the founders' previews venture, Kazaa ...
> WHY [VIDEOPHONY FAILED]
> The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.
[0] http://books.google.com/books?id=Nhe2yvx6hP8C&lpg=PP1...
As I wrote two days ago ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2707775 ), Paul Adams, previously social research lead in the Google UX team, left Google for Facebook in December: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/20/paul-adams-googler-whose-pr...
"For a social platform, the implication of turning a feature into a core part of the user experience cannot be overstated. It's because the real feature of social platforms are the way its user base exploits it. If only a few users rely on friends lists as a filtering feature, the feature might as well not be there. But G+ says: "Hey! Welcome! The first thing you should do is setup some filters!" Add a few thousand users and the bandwagon effect will turn G+ into a much different place than Facebook."
https://plus.google.com/107988469357342173268/posts/eHccmEr4...
I remember when Yahoo! IM chat had video chat and it was all porn and even then only the really outgoing and pervs seemed to use it. This was in the days of Connectix quick cam "eyeball cam" and it was that was b&w, or at least the first ones were.
For some reason live video hasn't really caught on and even now it's not used that much at least by people I know. Is Facetime or Skype video used much?
You see this in many responses to google+'s group video chat. many say it's done right and want to use it. Another hint is group telepresence for businesses. it's pretty successful even tought very expensive.
And some people who use video chat to remote relationships use it in a unique way: not the center of the experience but part of a shared experience. So they put a video chat on a laptop and in their main computer they watch a synchronized movie together , for example.
And still the quality for most people isn't very good because of cameras and bandwidth issues.
So that's part of what exciting with google+ video chat. that they may finally get it right and at scale.
> We will honor embargoes from trusted companies and PR firms who give us the news exclusively
Bleh.
If there is free videoconferencing on facebook, what are the advantages of paying for it on skype?
Edit: To add that I hope Google offers a paid version without the data mining or adverts. I assume this is the monetization strategy for Google+, if someone knows differently, please let me know.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B#Features
Edit: Added citation.
Sure Google will mine some meaningful user data and Google+ will almost certainly be a success in terms of generating additional advertising revenue. But it's now even less unlikely to take off with consumers.
The problem is that Google+ is an attempt to solve Google's problem - shareholders' demand for a presence in "Social Networking," rather than solving an actual problem experienced by social networking service consumers.
Also, a huge benefit of g+ that I saw somebody point out was that I get my social presence on other google properties like Gmail, Gcal, Finance, etc via the new top navigator bar. So I don't think G+ is only video chat.
That may not be such a bad thing. On top of that, unless they fix their privacy concerns, some people will always prefer Google+.
I disagree that it's not solving users' problems. Circles seems to be an intuitive way to group people that you have different conversations with. Yes, FB has lists but IMHO circles is a better approach.
Circles are just not something which is going to cause a quarter of a billion people to switch away from Facebook - particularly given Google+ is invitation only. And even if that many people switched, Google+ would be half the current size of Facebook.
Even if you just have two circles - "work" and "personal" I think a lot of people will benefit from this.
It's pretty painless.
As I'm using Gmail, search, documents, finance, whatever -- I get + notifications about friends, their updates, and photos. It's very distracting! But it also gets me to use the service more than I use Facebook -- and it's just started.
There are also rough edges (updating circles while trying to share something requires a page reload for me. ick).
Google is back in a big way, and it's exciting.
And that's why Google+ circles don't aren't really a game changer - it doesn't significantly reduce the friction of managing notifications except for the small segment of people who are already interested in managing those notifications.
Competition is good.
What about family-wide hangouts? Seems like a pretty killer feature for families spread across different cities.
Also, what is the deal with 'mom' always being the example. What about dad? Everyone seems to have really low opinions of their mothers...