Facebook and Skype a potential partnership

Facebook and Skype are in talks to establish a partnership that would combine the communication services, the Wall Street Journal said, citing a person familiar with the situation.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook users would be able to sign in to Skype through their Facebook Connect accounts. They would then be able to text message, voice chat, and video chat with Facebook friends through Skype.

Enabling Skype's chat on Facebook would be a "logical progression" to the partnership, the source said.

This talk is coming at an interesting time. Skype is preparing an IPO and a partnership with Facebook can bring the skype network to one billion users assuming no Facebook user has a skype account. Skype has right now 600 million users world wide, most likely many Facebook users have already a skype account, but even if all have a skype account the partnership can be a win for both.

Apple is pushing their face time which supposedly is open standard that other devices can use but skype and Facebook can bring over night 500 million people together which Apple could only dream about. Almost all smart phones have a Facebook application. Imagine the application would allow to make video calls. Not only mobile Facebook users can make video calls to each other but as well mobile to notebook and desktop, or calls from Facebook to landlines, just from one day to the other.
As a result skype could pump up their pay calls using Facebook credits.
Maybe Facebook users buy credits for zynga, earn more credits playing farmville and use the credits to make paid calls through Facebook to overseas.

Skype build into Facebook would be the killer, and skype could still have a stand alone application with facebook functionality. As an example my sister in Germany uses skype all the time to call me but is not a Facebook user. She might suddenly see in her skype account friends of mine through the facebook connect because I have an Facebook account. She would see a friend of mine who could be her friend too. She now would be able to call him even he has no Skype account.

Suddenly Skype and Facebook users are one big community.

Facebook on the other hand can get much more integrated into commercial sites.
A brand page might have a hotline number which now is connected to facebook.

Skype is as well partnering with Avaya to get a better entry into company Voice over IP. Avaya will work close with skype together to build a business version of skype to allow IT operations easier to distribute and service skype.

If then Facebook will start to offer their website for business (as close groups), then there would be a big chance for both to enter the business world with the most comprehensive social intranet, extranet, company instant messaging, ip telephony etc etc.

Maybe Facebook is buying Asana to build for this venture an enterprise-level collaboration software (which was founded by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, and Justin Rosenstein, an alum of both Facebook and Google),

Bringing Facebook and skype together could eliminate as well Vonage and other VoIP companies for home use, using a wifi phone where the computer does not be switched on to get Facebook messages or calls.

This is a total connect.

- Posted using My iPad

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States