Facebook unveils deal with Skype as battle with Google hots up

Facebook today announced a deal with Skype that will add live video chat to the social-networking site - marking the latest step-up in the battle against Google.

Founder of the social networking site, Mark Zuckerberg said it was an 'awesome' development for Skype as his company takes on the might of the inteet search engine.

Google recently launched its Google+ service which also has a feature that allows video calls and the two companies are now locked in a head-to-head technological race.

Until now Facebook users have been limited to instant text chat and the move to incorporate Skype takes their game to the next level.

Both companies agreed the deal to allow video chat to be integrated into the site which will mean people can have 'face-to-face' conversations with just one click of the button.

Google+, which launched on June 28, includes video conferencing for up to 10 people on its application called Hangouts.

The new service is currently open to people on an 'invitation only' basis whereas anybody can have a Facebook account and the latest move by the site could hamper the success of Google+.

Skype boss Tony Bates said that seeing the product used in Facebook was 'really gratifying'.

Let's chat: The image on invitations for the announcement show a face in a speech bubble, which have strengthen rumours of a new Skype feature

Rumours of the deal began with invitations for the event, which featured the picture of a face inside a speech bubble.

The move could dramatically increase the use of Skype, which currently has 170 million active users compared to Facebook's 750 million.

The partnership would bring Facebook closer to Microsoft, which is one of its shareholders and bought Skype for $8.5 billion in May.

Mr Zuckerberg said during a visit to Facebook's Seattle office on Wednesday that the company has an imminent launch, but revealed scant details.

He said the project had been developed at the 40-person Seattle office, Facebook's only major engineering centre outside of its Palo Alto, Califoia headquarters.

There has been speculation in technology blogs in recent weeks about various mobile products in development at Facebook, including the release of a long-awaited Facebook app for Apple's iPad and a specialised app for photo-sharing on the iPhone.

Facebook's Seattle office has made a mark on the company's mobile efforts, playing a central role in the development of Facebook's unified mobile site, unveiled in March.

Facebook, the world's largest Inteet social network with more than 500 million users, is increasingly challenging established online companies like Google and Yahoo for consumers' time online and for advertising dollars.

According to the company, people that use Facebook on mobile devices are twice as active on the service than users on PCs.

Speculation: There are rumours that the 'awesome' launch could be a new product for iPad users

'A trend is mobile… which means that instead of being just on a computer when you're at a computer, you're at a computer all the time,' said Mr Zuckerberg.

'It means you can share more stuff and then the final thing is that people's attitude towards sharing in society is changing.

'If you look back 30 years, I think people's attitude towards wanting to put something out there would've been different than it is today, where now every high school student, college student has the opportunity to have a blog, or a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, and can use those things to share things and that's much more of the norm now.

'I think instead of just primarily being afraid of the impact of that, now people are now primarily starting to see that that actually can be very valuable.'