Facebook tackles Google+ with group chat and Skype integration
Facebook’s boss Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the crowd of journalists summoned to the company’s Palo Alto headquarters to reveal new Facebook features designed to tackle the Google+ threat. He began by saying that the industry is quickly approaching an inflexion point where focus will be on apps rather than the number of registered users. Facebook has over 750 million users, he said. Facebook is hoping to zoom past the one billion mark in the near future, he said, predicting that the social networking industry at large will soon measure its user base in billions.
Social today is about sharing. It’s about what people do on social networks, what content they share and so forth. Sharing on Facebook is growing at an exponential rate, said the executive who famously had the “I’m CEO, bitch” tagline printed on his business card in the early days. Today, an average Facebook user is sharing twice as much than the previous year and in 2012 will share double the items shared today. “We’re at the elbow of the curve,” Zuck said. For example, people share four billion things on aggregate each day on Facebook. This figure excludes direct interactions between users, such as instant messages.
He then took this huge jab at Google:
We just have this belief at Facebook validated by the success of Facebook, entrepreneurs who focus on one thing do better.
Zuckerberg predicted proliferation of apps which are “the biggest driver for us”. Mobile and the ability to segment stuff into groups are the #2 and #3 things for the company, respectively, he said. The CEO then proceeded to unveil an improved Groups feature, a redesigned chat and an all-new video calling via Skype. More about that plus a nice promo clip showing off Skype video calling right below the fold.
