It’s all go in mergers and partnerships for websites at the moment. While the rumours about the Facebook phone are hanging around like a belligerent kid that doesn’t want to go to bed, it seems that the social network has made a new friend in the world of telephony as the latest incarnation of Skype now has Facebook fully integrated into it so that your Facebook friends can be linked with their Skype details in your Skype page.
Skype is probably one of very few services that can actually boast more users than Facebook too. It has a more than slightly impressive 560 million registered users and 61 million of these are fully paid customers. Facebook has around 500 million users so between them they can muster up a staggering 1 billion users, although that’s probably not true because many people will have a membership with both but the number looked good.
Skype 5.0 is the latest version of the Internet calling service and as well as allowing registered users to make free calls and send chat messages to one another, it also now has a Facebook tab. This tab will include a list of Facebook friends and it will allow users the chance to call their Facebook friends on the landline or mobile phone. There’s even a beta of free video calling thrown in there for good measure so it’s definitely worth a download if chatting and texting is your thing.
Although Skype is far from a traditional communications company, it is closer to this model than Facebook and the deal is an interesting one that could herald further deals in the future between other tech companies and social networks. Watch this space.
