In a live event this afternoon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a set of “awesome” new features centered on chat. He broke the announcement down into three areas: group chat, the chat interface, and video chat.
Facebook has had groups available for a year, and in that time, 50 percent of its users have become active group members. While you could always chat within a group, Facebook now makes it possible to create group chats on the fly, without a pre-built group. Just add people to the chat from your buddy list and you have a spontaneous group chat. Offline users receive an email summary of the chat they missed.
The update to the chat interface makes this process more fluid. If your screen is wide enough (how wide was not specified), Facebook will soon show your buddy list on the left side of the screen at all times, rather than having to manually open it. That makes adding people to a chat a single-click process.
Image courtesy of CNN
Most impressive might be Facebook teaming up with Skype to launches video chat. This video chat is designed for simplicity, and Skype doesn’t need to be pre-installed. Instead, you install a plugin with a single click when you start your first video chat.
The news gave the crowd at Zukerberg’s announcement some excitement, but there’s no group video chat yet (the first question during the Q&A after the event was about Google+ Hangouts). Zuckerberg seemed stunned when asked if any of the features would be available to mobile users (group chat only, and even that seems to be just because all chats go to the same inbox).
The new features should be rolling out to all Facebook users today. Let us know what you think in the comments.
[…] of Facebook friends. Fortunately for us, Israeli web dev Tal Alter, who was the first to discover Facebook’s video chat plans with Skype last year, has already figured out a […]