The Facebook ‘Awesome‘ announcement has been confirmed for July 6th, next Wednesday, and is being held at the companies Palo Alto headquarters.
Invites have been sent out for an event beginning at 10am local time, and the speculation ranges from the iPad dedicated App to an improved photo sharing service, eithe rintegrated into the existing App or a new one entirely.
However, TechCrunch is quoting a source that claims the event will release integrated Skype Video Chat into the Facebook service.
Facebook will launch a new video chat product, powered by Skype, that works in browser. Suddenly those chat icons in the invitation have a lot more meaning.
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.
This comes to no surprise to us after Microsoft, already invested in Facebook financially and integrated heavily within their Windows Phone product, recently purchased Skype. They will be looking to increase the Skype userbase up from its current 170 million by leveraging Facebook users and their Windows Phone handsets.
This post was written by Rob Gordon, an IT geek, gadget lover and blogger. Rob has been using the internets since 1994 when the only streaming video was that coffee pot in Cambridge (rip)….
Follow Rob on Twitter – @robgordon – about.me/robgordonuk
