Skype Gets Serious Facebook Integration

Skype 5.0 for Windows has just been released with a slew of improvements and feature additions, most significant of which is the inclusion of a Facebook tab that allows users to SMS, chat or call their Facebook friends via Skype right from the News Feed.

Skype’s Facebook integration is both sophisticated and sleek, and brings your Facebook experience inside Skype. Skype now offers a gateway to immediately call, text or chat with your Facebook contacts.

Facebook and Skype play nice inside the new Skype Home area of the application. Click the home icon and you’ll get the expanded Skype Home area, which is just a personal dashboard with news, alerts and a digest of mood messages. The new Facebook tab lives in this area, and this is where you can go to view your Facebook News Feed and Phonebook inside Skype.

The Facebook News Feed option will display a digest of activity nearly identical to what you would see if you were on Facebook, except that below each status update there are two noticeable Skype buttons: SMS or Call. The buttons appear if Facebook friends have included their phone number in their Facebook profile.

If the friend is a mutual connection on Skype, you’ll also have the option to initiate a free Skype call. And, if the Facebook friend is not already a Skype connection, but both of you are on Skype at the same time, the same free Skype call option is visible and an additional plus button will show up so you can add the Facebook friend as a Skype contact.

Skype’s News Feed integrations are great for initiating spontaneous contact around real-time updates, but you can also toggle over to the Facebook Phonebook section — a.k.a your Facebook contact list — should you want a more direct way to search for and reach specific friends.

These features are significant, but Skype’s latest 5.0 release includes way more than Facebook — there’s improved 10-way group video calling, much enhanced contact lists, more emphasis on profiles and a completely retooled user experience.

Video calling, for instance, now includes a “dynamic view” option that automatically positions the person speaking in the larger video window. In addition, Skype promises improved (and still free) 10-way group video calling, and the company has released an automatic recovery feature that will get disconnected audio and video chatters back up and running in seconds.

Contact lists got a face lift with the prominent inclusion of photos, and members will be now nudged to add a photo to their profile. Profile photos will factor into the search experience, which should make it easier for members to better find and add their friends to Skype.

Ultimately, these big changes point to Skype’s designs to be more than a secondary utility, and instead the primary connector between friends, family and our social contacts. Unfortunately, we Mac users will have to wait patiently for these features to make their way to us. Skype makes no promises on timing, but does tell Mashable that a similar Mac version is coming soon.

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Skype 5.0 Screenshots

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[via mashable]

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Posted in: Skype

Skype and Facebook to Announce Partnership [REPORT]

Facebook and Skype are working on a deal that would integrate Facebook Connect with Skype accounts, AllThingsD has learned, citing sources familiar with the situation.

ATD has managed to get a hold of a screenshot showing the new features in action. Once you connect Skype with Facebook, you’ll be able to SMS, chat with or call your Facebook friends directly from Skype. You should also be able to log in to Skype with your Facebook credentials.

The new features should go live on Skype 5.0 when the new version goes out of beta in a couple of weeks.

It’s a logical step for both companies. Facebook’s chat capabilities are somewhat limited compared toGoogle Talk, which is deeply integrated with Gmail, and offers voice and video chat capabilities. Enabling new ways to communicate with your Facebook friends is definitely one of Facebook’s goals. Skype, on the other hand, will be very happy to extend its user base to Facebook’s 500+ million users.

If the story turns out to be true, it will be interesting to see whether Facebook will also integrate Skype features into its web interface, or perhaps its mobile application.

[via mashable]

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Posted in: Facebook,Skype

Fring Challenges Skype With $0.01 Per Minute VoIP Calls

The mobile voice over IP (VoIP) service Fring now allows its users to make phone calls to land line and cell phone numbers anywhere in the world with prices starting at one cent per minute. Not all calls will be that cheap. Calls to Canada start at 0.4 cents per minute, and calls to India start at 1.1 cents, for example. But it’s more competition in a very small space currently dominated by Skype and to a lesser extent Google Voice.

You used to be able to make Skype calls using the Fringapplications for mobile phones like the iPhone and Android devices, but following the launch of the iPhone 4, Skype and Fring got in a bit of a scuffle and Fring users were left in the cold — no Skype access.

Rather than bridge the gap between the two services, Fring has opted to launch its own service to connect its users with outside phone lines. That service is called fringOut, and it’s hard to miss that it sounds a lot like Skype’s own service for that purpose, SkypeOut.

FringOut works on Nokia phones right now and iPhone and Android support are coming in the near future, according to Fring’s press release. The release doesn’t give a detailed breakdown of costs, but there’s a rate calculator at the Fring website.

If you have a Nokia phone, give it a shot and let us know how it works. If not, hey, at least Fring provided a dorky, silent film-inspired video to keep you distracted while you wait for fringOut to show up on your platform of choice! Watch below.

[via mashable]

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Posted in: Fring,Skype