Video calls on Facebook…And on iPhone?

by Yisnar / July 7, 2011 7:15 PM EDT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqd_4KSbnJo

Hello iPhoneate friends…! I bring you this relevant news from California. As the title says, Facebook, the world's largest social network with almost 75 million active users worldwide, has announced new features: video calls between users using Skype technology. The bad news for Apple users (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) is that it won't be compatible with our iDevices.

The presentation of Facebook's new features ended a few hours ago; it was the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who presented group chats and video calls from the browser using a Skype plugin.

Of these new features, Zuckerberg confirmed in the Q&A session at the end of the event that only group chat will be added to the Facebook app for iOS, but no video calls for now. It doesn't really matter too much because we have other apps that can help us do the same thing, but it's a shame that for now they're focusing more on the web browser and less on mobile devices. Everything about Project Spartan and the iPad app has, for now, been left in limbo… not only was it not mentioned in this presentation of new features, but now there isn't even a date or any hope that any of it will actually happen. iPad users, for now, will have to continue making do with the iPhone app (which works terribly) or the web version, which is much better on the larger screen of Apple's device.

That's right, folks, so we hope they'll update the official Facebook app for our iDevices soon.

If you want to try Facebook's new video call feature, here's the tutorial 😉

To begin, we went to Facebook Videocalling

http://www.facebook.com/videocalling

We select a contact from the chat, and then click on the small button that has a webcam to begin the setup.

Then, we click on “Configure”.

After doing so, a window will open showing a file to download, called “FacebookVideoCallSetup_v1.2.199.0.exe”. Click on “Save file”.

Once downloaded, we run it and it will install automatically.

Finally, we click again on the "camera" icon in the chat and the call will automatically open with whomever we want (it is necessary that they have video calls configured and have Skype installed).

All set! We're now on a video call.

It's important to clarify that if you're calling someone who doesn't have the extension installed, Facebook will notify them how to download and install it. I hope this brief explanation is helpful.