I have never heard of them, but I guess they also make voice chat for Second Life and EVE online, neither of which I have ever played but both have a decent following, so there must be tons of people out there that regularly use their service. Adding this to Facebook makes some sense. Basically Facebook is taking the next step to make itself a totally integral part of your life. Now you can not only stalk your friends and acquaintances, waste lots of time playing Mafia wars, and comparing which 80’s icons you best match to your friends - you can do it all while actually talking to the person!
A while back Facebook rolled out its own chat feature which was basically a way to instant message your friends who are logged into Facebook too. I never use this feature and from what people have said, it never really worked all that well. I think that the voice chat will follow suit. It’s an interesting thing to add to Facebook but in the end it will not be all that revolutionary or even useful. I am sure some people will use it, it does make more sense that eBay buying Skype, however, because at least Facebook is meant to be a social experience.
There has been some speculation that this would cause people to strip down their friend list so that casual acquaintances don't try to voice chat them. I honestly don’t think that this will be the case, basically because this works both ways. For example I have a bunch of people in my friends list that I do not want to talk to on the phone or via a voice chat because I am not friends with these people enough to want to really talk to them. If you know me, you know that I don’t even really like talking on the phone to people I do like so I will never start a voice chat with any of them. Now this works in reverse too, I am sure I am on some peoples' friends list and they don’t want to talk to me, so they never will. Time is a premium in our society, why would people waste it talking on voice chat to people they don’t really care to talk to anyway? I think that our friend lists will remain more or less the same and this new feature will have very little impact (especially since I will only be logging into Facebook Lite).
In conclusion I think it’s interesting that Facebook added this, I am planning another entry that will go into detail about this, but over all I don’t think the voice chat will have much of an impact on Facebook users at all… at least not now.
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