Social Media Giant Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerburg’s announcement on Wednesday that his company would ‘launch something awesome’ sometime next week has fueled a lot of speculations in the tech world.
“The 27-year old billionaire didn’t reveal any further details other than that the project was developed on Facebook’s 40-person Seattle campus, its only other engineering site outside of Palo Alto, California, where it’s based,” said PC World.
The PC World speculated that the announcement could be regarding a response to Google+ or it could relate to mobile devices, particularly the iPad, given the Seattle office’s focus.There were also unconfirmed murmurs that the announcement could be heralding a new photo sharing service for iPhone that would mimic the sharing features of apps such as Color and Instagram.
Techland Time speculated on the same lines but also kept the option of ‘Facebook having something else up its sleeve’ open.
Tech Crunch on its part said, ” We know for sure it won’t be Project Spartan, the HTML5 based app platform that Facebook has been working on with a small group of outside developers in secret for months. Spartan will not be ready to go before the middle of July at the earliest and nor is it based in Seattle.”
M G Siegler of Tech Crunch speculates that it might have a desktop component given all the desktop software hiring going on in Seattle. And the Tech Crunch post says that he could be right. A source with knowledge of the partnership says that next week Facebook will launch a new video chat product, powered by Skype, that works in browser.
Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch elaborates in the post, ” The product has been built on Skype and will include a desktop component. It’s not clear to me whether that means it will just work if a user has Skype already installed on the computer, or if additional software will need to be downloaded even if the user already uses Skype. But it’s clear that there’s very deep integration between the products, and from the user’s perspective, the product will be an ‘in-browser’ experience.”
Emil Protalinski of ZDNet says, “Facebook and Skype first talked about a potential partnership in September 2010, but they could not reach an agreement. When Skype 5.0 was released in October 2010, the new version offered voice calling between Facebook friends, but it did not include a video chatting feature. The integration was a one-way road: only Skype added some Facebook features to its client.
Following rumors that Google, Facebook and Microsoft were all interested in Skype, the software giant swooped in. Two months ago, Microsoft announced that it was acquiring Skype for $ 8.5 billion in cash. The deal was approved by the boards of directors of both companies, and is Microsoft’s largest acquisition to date.
While Facebook failed to buy Skype, the company was still likely very pleased that Microsoft got the Luxembourg-based company rather than Google. Microsoft and Facebook have been partners for a very long time. One of the biggest reasons for this is simple: the software giant and the social giant realize they need to work together to compete with the search giant – Google.
It all started in October 2007, when Microsoft invested $ 240 million in Facebook. Then in October 2009, Microsoft announced a global partnership with Facebook to add status updates to Bing search results. In June 2010, Microsoft added Facebook integration to bing.com/social. In October 2010, Bing began showing what your friends have ‘Liked’ and started to offer Facebook-powered people search results. Finally, in May 2011, Bing added even more Facebook features to its social search.
Facebook reportedly has 750 million active users and since Skype only has 170 million users, it’s understandable what Skype gains from this integration. On the other hand, data has shown that Facebook users want voice and video chat, so it’s clear that the social network will benefit as well.
Considering that the press invitations to the event says nothing more than “Please join us for an event at Facebook on July 6” – it remains to be seen whether the speculations by the technology blogs have hit the nail on the head or whether they are way-off the mark.