Los Angeles — Just last week, Facebook’s introduction of Skype-powered video chat service was perhaps the gem of their “awesome” announcement. Soon, the popular social media network Facebook will be expanding its Chat product with group video calling functionality, powered by TinyChat, a video chat service backed by celebs like P. Diddy and Ashton Kutcher, is filling the gap.
The recent teaming up of Skype with Facebook has been widely approved from within Facebook and oft-discussed well beyond those boundaries. Now, users who do not want to rely on Facebook’s video chat could soon have another option.
Next week, Tinychat will introduce a Facebook-powered group video chat application that will function on both iOS devices and desktop browsers. In addition, the application supports video chat sessions of up to 12 people at once and all you need to use it is a Facebook account.
According to a report at TechCrunch, Tinychat will release an iPhone/iPad app that empowers users to add up to 12 Facebook friends into a video chat, which will take place on mobile devices. While desktop use are rumored to be supported, Tinychat’’s upcoming app is mainly designed to work with the mobile user in mind.
Further, the report states that while the iOS platform is the primary target for the upcoming app, Android will soon be included in Tinychat’s Facebook group video chat support. Currently, there is no official news available at Tinychat’s site, but the 12 users theme is represented in a description of their non-mobile service:
Share up to twelve broadcasts simultaneously! With text, video, and audio chat, you and your friends can connect and talk from anywhere in the world.
Dan Blake, CEO of TinyChat speaking to TechCrunch stated that TinyChat’s Web service already serves 25 million monthly visits and nearly 100,000 new users per day, but with Facebook’s growing audience of over 750 million monthly users, that number could skyrocket.
Apparently, Tinychat caters to over 1 billion minutes of video chat content a month, which would indicate they have the infrastructure to support mobile group chat. It would appear as if Tinychat is leveraging Facebook’s ability to organize friends and connections.
Moreover, TinyChat has recently been making some changes. In May, they introduced a location-based feature that allows you to see a map of where everyone you are talking to is located. While this new chat app might only be available for iOS, we can expect it to come to Android at a later date.
Besides, to enjoy group chat, all you need to do from your iOS (and soon Android) devices or your desktop via Tinychat is to have a Facebook account, which, you know, more than 750 million people do. In short, I seems that this app will certainly be a hit.
In addition, the promotional video below demonstrates what the app will look like, but it is the fact that it support video calls from the desktop as well as iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices that sets it apart from similar applications from fring and Tango (and Google+ Hangouts).
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