MySpace, Skype announce partnership (2007) | Hacker News Reader

MySpace, Skype announce partnership (2007)

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213 pointstimjahn45 comments

"Some pundits are complaining that the technology is not new, but that’s besides the point. Case in point: at MySpace we launched what Zuckerberg is announcing in 2007 (try googling “myspace skype partnership”), and MySpace also had one-on-one video chat back in 2004. The point is that people weren’t really ready for it back then—now is the time, and Facebook has the user base. The large user base (750 million) paired with a simple integration of arguably the best voice/video tech (Skype) is what makes this news."

-Tom Anderson, founder of MySpace

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/06/zuckerberg-first-public-res...

Tom gets it. One of the problems with experience is that you have, well umm, experience. It's the unfortunate ability to say, "We did video chat X years ago. Didn't work out, it's a bad idea."

I've seen this type of thinking first hand. You must understand why it didn't work before, and what is different now. I can see people at MS saying, "The iPad will never work. We tried tablets w/o keyboards back in 2002 and everyone wanted convertibles. It'll never work."

Little differences can be a big deal. Experience is not useful w/o the analysis to put your experience in perspective.

Agreed. I love Tom's overall tone in that article.

I love that a 4 year old news story is on the front page of Hacker news and inspiring a deep discussion.

History is full of deep discussions. ;)

While it's certainly true that past performance of a technology is not a flawless indicator of future success, I'm not clear on what makes "now" the time for video chat.

With the iPad, Apple's key insight was that tablets had sucked because the OS hadn't been meticulously tuned to afford use on tablets. I'm curious as to what people think the key insight is that Facebook is bringing to video chat?

From what I'm reading here the TC author seems to think that Joe Average User wasn't using skype or stickam or any of the previous offerings for video chat because the user base wasn't there. I don't know about that, because all of my friends have had skype forever and I can count the number of times I've video chatted with them on one finger. I feel like I wasn't using those, and won't be using this, not because the user base wasn't FIXNUM huge, but because it feels intrusive and I don't want to feel like I have to shower, shave, and put on presentable clothes just to tool around on Facebook.

A big reason why Skype wasn't big on MySpace was that it wasn't seamless to use -- at least from my vague recollection didn't it require users to download MySpaceIM? That alone makes it a non-starter for a lot of people.

The other issue is that MySpace never reached this critical mass of users that Facebook has. I can see video chat being about Facebook, more than Skype over the next year. "Get on Facebook so we can video chat".

Lastly, broadband penetration and bandwidth is that much better since 2007.

Facebook still requires downloading a plugin to use video chat, so it has the same barrier to entry. I don't see being able to video chat from within my facebook.com window instead of in my Skype.app window as being a huge advantage.

Case in point: I told my younger sister about Facebook's announcement today, and she didn't really care since she already had Skype to video chat with her friends. Then I told her about Google+'s Hangout feature and her eyes lit up.

Video chatting is no longer a killer feature, but group video chatting is as long as Skype maintains premium pricing for group chats.

Facebook still requires downloading a plugin to use video chat, so it has the same barrier to entry.

No, Facebook will install it automatically. With MySpace you had to do a separate download to get the MySpaceIM client.

I told my younger sister about Facebook's announcement today, and she didn't really care since she already had Skype to video chat with her friends.

I have Skype and Facebook both today too. I have like 8 addresses in my Skype book. I have about 200 friends in Facebook, which includes almost everyone I talk to. I don't think my setup is all that unusual.

I used Facebook video chat this morning, and it required a download that you then had to run in order to proceed.

So to be clear, you had to go to a seperate webpage, download the plugin, go back to Facebook, and start up the chat session? I want to make sure that the old MySpace experience current FB experience are the same.

Nobody is claiming that Facebook's experience is as bad as MySpace. I'm sure it is much better, but that's irrelevant because Facebook isn't competing with MySpace. It's competing with Google+ and Skype, ironically.

I don't think Skype is a competitor to Facebook at all. Facebook has had a good partnership with Microsoft for several years and have finally found a good social element that Microsoft brings to the table (Skype).

Skype is great for video calls, Phone calls...and thats about it. Facebook does everything else.

Skype may have a good relationship with Facebook, but their products are still indirectly competing. Now that Facebook supports one-to-one video chat, I have no reason to download or register with Skype. Facebook went through great pains to keep user data anonymous from Skype. If Facebook is successful in getting its users to video chat, Skype will effectively become just a technology provider. Once that happens, Facebook could replace the underlying Skype technology with something developed in-house, thus killing Skype entirely.

Of course, given the good relations that Facebook has with Skype/Microsoft, I doubt they have any desire or intention to kill Skype, but the two services are certainly competing for the same users now.

Facebook's video chatting feature has no influence on my decision to use Google+, but it does influence my decision to use Skype.

I do understand your reasoning and logic behind your belief. If you were to ask someone now: "What application do you use to video chat with?" the answer is most likely going to sway heavy to Skype. If you ask that question in 3 to 9 months time and that answer has not changed, then Skype will be just fine.

Personally, I don't like the idea of video chatting through Facebook. I use skype exclusively to video chat because its what I am accustomed too, it's the application I trust. Trust being the keyword there because I do not trust Facebook.

This whole particular subthread is about the old MySpace experience vs the current FB experience and why small differences in the experience can yield different outcomes.

That's like Microsoft saying that they did tablets well before Apple did iPad. Though true, the experience of thoese two devices is vastly different. Windows 8 looks very promising though...

I once worked at a smallish company that had been around for 20 years. In that time, they had tried just about everything and had failed at most things. It was very frustrating to work with people who considered things like test automation, normalized database structures, not copying and pasting to be discredited concepts.

It's a different feature. The skype button on myspace would bring up skype and require the other side to have a skype account.

The Facebook feature runs in the browser and guides the receiving side through the process of enabling in-browser video calls.

That said, I agree that Facebook's announcement is not that big of a deal.

On the contrary, I think it's a big deal. Facebook has unprecedented reach.

Grandmas everywhere will now be playing bridge over video chat. :)

Does Facebook have group video chat now? Not even Skype proper supports that afaik.

Good point. Analogy fail on my end.

Just FYI, Skype proper (but not on facebook) does support group video chats as a paid extra feature now: http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/features/allfeatures/group-v...

Next feature announcement from Facebook: ghetto bling wallpapers

According to this article it wasn't about video but free Internet phone calls.

As Tom Anderson (founder of Myspace) stated on Google+ (https://plus.google.com/112063946124358686266/posts/g2zmxn1L...) Myspace had one-on-one video chat back in 2004 but I guess without the help of Skype and without the necessary broadband penetration it wasn't all that useful.

Still blows my mind that they had video chat that far back.

first time i saw video from camera being immediately rendered inside a window on computer screen in 1995 (it was in Russia where we were technically noticeably behind the West) It still blows my mind what video chat is still not ubiquitous, and that a company adding video chat feature is a matter to notice.

Video chat isn't a technical problem, it's a social problem. I have multiple ways to video chat almost wherever I am, but I almost never want to video chat. When was the last time when you wanted to video chat but couldn't? That's never happened to me.

i guess that you're a Generation X-er, around my age, ie. ~40 years :)

I'm in my 20s...

I think that younger generations are the same, if not more so. Texting is far less intimate than a phone call, and a video chat is more intimate than a phone call. People are going in the other direction for most of their daily social contact.

I don't want to video chat that often but the reason is that the only way to do so is through Skype (hard to convince anybody to move to a different service) and the video and voice quality is usually really bad so yes, I do think it is a technical problem (maybe not just software though).

I'd love to video chat with my baby daughter in the mornings because i go to work before she wakes up. But cannot because due to bandwidth issues, its an awful experience. So count me as an adopter if and when video chat ever becomes good!

Video chat is good, it sounds like you just need more bandwidth.

2004 wasn't that far back.

Just noticed the title of this post changed from what I originally entered.

I was unaware somebody was able to do this. Who has the ability?

(I don't mind, just curious.)

It used to say "3 years ago" right?

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That has some guidelines on titles and mentions that "the editors may rewrite it."... perhaps they didn't like that you used the number 3, and preferred 2007 because that has more meaning?

Ah, oops. I promise I'll read the rules next time. ;)

Features alone do not a good product make.

How many actual active users does myspace still have at this point?

execution execution execution

unwords $ replicate 3 "timing, execution"

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