Video calls aren’t new. They debuted in the 1939 World Fair, and were the vision of the future in the 1960s animated cartoon The Jetsons, but the world never quite took to the technology. But over the last decade, Skype and other instant-message companies’ free video chat services have quietly turned us onto to the technology. And on Wednesday, Facebook announced that its legion of members can now all video call each other with a few simple clicks, perhaps marking the official turning point for a 72 year-old technology. In fact, video calling is turning out to be the battleground du jour between Google and Facebook, as the two tech giants are angling to become the place where you identify yourself online and connect with friends, business partners and acquaintances.
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After a one-time download of Skype’s technology, the video calls look to be painless and simple for anyone to use. And Facebook has a lot of anyones — 750 million of them. As technology goes, the new feature breaks little ground. Free video calls via IM services such as Yahoo, AIM and GTalk have been around for years. Skype, the world’s largest telecom company — as measured by minutes of phone calls — has long offered free one-to-one video calling. So the news from Facebook is in the simplicity of the technology and that Facebook is instantly putting the tech into the hands of hundreds of millions of hands, with the promise if you can Farmville, you can video-call your high school sweetheart. That’s key because hundreds of millions of users have built giant webs of connections inside Facebook, and now you can simply call them by clicking once inside Facebook. No need to ask what their Skype or AIM handle is. No one even needs a Skype account to use the feature. So long as the chat feature is decently usable, it’s hard to see how it won’t be a heavily used feature that keeps Facebookers coming back. (And given it’s based on Skype’s decentralized and proven peer-to-peer technology, it’s unlikely that it won’t hold up under even an extraordinary crush of eager users). Compare that to Hangout, Google’s new video chat in its still invite-only social network Google+. Hangout is designed as a group chat application for impromptu socializing with friends. To start one, you press a button declaring you are open to hanging out, choose which circle(s) of friends to send the invite to, and up to 10 people can be in the room at any one time. The loudest talker gets the big space up top — and the group can collectively talk or even watch YouTube videos together. As young Marty McFly once said in a different context, your kids are going to love it. The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham said the chatroom “changed her life,” and that she and her friends are finding themselves addicted and up all night in the chat room. And from a technical standpoint, it’s a marvel compared to Facebook’s Skype integration. From a social perspective, it’s also very different. You can, if you like, simply chat with one person, by inviting only that person to huddle. But unlike with Facebook, the invite doesn’t immediately pop up on their screen as a notification — instead it shows up in their inbox or their stream of updates on their profile page. For the coming weeks, it’ll be a very intriguing test of what it is that people want most from their social networks — serendipitous online partying or intimate one-on-one conversations with family and friends. (To be fair, Google+ also has Google Talk’s video chat in the sidebar, but it’s not deeply integrated into the service and feels like a simple cut-and-paste from Gmail’s interface.) But don’t expect the differences — and limitations — to last too long. Skype has the capability to do group chats, and has cheap outbound calling to the traditional phone network. Meanwhile Google has a panoply of other communication technologies, including one-to-one video chat — Google Talk — and free phone calls within the United States and cheap international calls that are currently bundled into Gmail. Expect both competitors to race to integrate all of these into their offerings. As for mobile video calling, the outlier Apple has the lead, for now, with its FaceTime software that lets iPhone4, iPad 2 and Mac users make video calls to one another. Skype recently bought Qik, the Android leader in mobile video chat, but the service hasn’t been hugely adopted by Android and iPhone users. Facebook’s Skype integration, likewise, doesn’t work on mobile devices or tablets yet. Google is a bit closer as Talk’s video service works from mobile phones and tablets running Gingerbread, the latest version of Android, but that’s a small percentage of the Android phones in the market. And at least for now, Hangout is a desktop- and laptop-only feature. Google and Apple’s best bet for mobile dominance likely resides in opening up their video calling protocols so that independent app makers can build interoperable video calling apps for a wide range of mobile devices and other platforms. Apple CEO Steve Jobs promised to make FaceTime an open standard, and Google is likely to try to match that with their new technology underlying Hangout. However, Skype is unlikely to do so: All signs from the past say no. And once it’s owned by Microsoft and paired with Facebook, it will have even less need to do so, since it will have easy access to hundreds of millions of users. Already Skype says it handles 300 million minutes of video calling a month, and at peak times, up to half of its call volume is now video. While we’re unlikely to end up in a world where you can call anyone on any service from any other service, one thing’s for sure. The world’s biggest tech companies are now convinced that the future will look something like
The Jetsons, even if few of us expect to the future’s workweek to limited to three hours a day, three days a week. But at least, we’ll be able to video call our spouses and family to explain why it is we are still working so much.
