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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

Apple does this every release. Marketing is important.

Facebook is now the ubiquitous video chat social network, built on Skype. Google+ is Circles on your Gmail. Everything else you say requires some level of convincing.

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Except that Hangout is a lot more social than the Facebook/Skype integration. Google+ has out-social'ed Facebook.

"A lot more social" is pretty vague.

Facebook is showing the signs of its alliance to Microsoft in more ways than one here.

I see one way (using Skype, although apparently that started some time ago). What are the other ways?

Downloading .exe files to Linux computers seems to be a very Microsofty thing to do.

I SERIOUSLY doubt MS was giving them architectural guidance on how to make this work. Probably would have more to do with the architectural experience of the devs.

I wasn't suggesting that MS told them to do that. To my knowledge, this first time that Facebook has left the Web and launched a feature only available to specific OSs by way of desktop applications.

Remember that this video chat is not a web page. It's a Microsoft (and Apple? I don't know) desktop application that integrates into their web page.

I'm suggesting that Facebook is showing their alliance to Microsoft by ignoring some other OSs and launching Microsoft-powered features. If you include video chat as an integral part of Facebook, then you can no longer call Facebook a web site.

Thanks. That wasn't clear from your earlier post (and I didn't know that this was a desktop app either).

:) To be fair, G+'s Hangouts is also currently a desktop app (requires the Gtalk plugin I think). I suspect Google will move away from that and go towards a full web page. We'll see. This is all so exciting.

Yes but they at least provide the appropriate plugin for Linux users.

Yep! I was Hanging Out on Ubuntu with 6 friends on about day 2 of G+. Facebook doesn't even support my OS, so there's absolutely 0 chance I'll use their video chat.

Did Google show their alliance to Microsoft when they released Chrome for Windows well ahead of other platforms?

Things I see them both doing: playing catch-up, stumbling on user experience, appealing to the lowest common denominator rather than the leading edge.

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