The tech press started buzzing earlier this month with reports that Facebook planned to add VoIP (voice over IP) calling to its Messenger app for the iPhone. The new feature officially arrived Tuesday, when Facebook released an update for its app.
What does it mean for you? Free calls. Sort of.
Facebook's app transmits calls using your phone's broadband connection,
whatever it is -- 3G, 4G or Wi-Fi. Instead of sucking up your monthly
allotted voice minutes from your cellular carrier, it sucks up
megabytes from your data plan. That's a boon for heavy talkers with
unlimited data plans.
This is nothing
new or technologically groundbreaking: Skype was doing it long before
Facebook. Facebook has many more active users than Skype, though, and
the allure of having to use one less network or app will appeal to some
(perhaps many).
But it's not all roses just yet. For now, this is a pretty limited offering.
Your phone won't alert you the way it does when you have a normal call:
Facebook calls just show up as a push notification. And right now, you
can only connect with a conversation partner who also has Messenger
installed on their iPhone.
There's no way to
ring up a Facebook friend who is logged in through the website, and
there isn't any way to place a call to a ten-digit phone number.
Calling is still absent from the Android and BlackBerry versions of the
Messenger app.
There's a good
reason for those omissions. The VoIP features in the Web version of
Facebook were built using Skype's technologies, while the calling
technology in Messenger is all Facebook. The ability to place and
receive calls using traditional phone numbers requires
telecommunications resources Facebook doesn't have (at the moment, at
least).
For the time being, services such as Google (GOOG, Fortune 500)
Voice and Skype have a leg up, given their larger feature sets. But
Facebook generally doesn't let anything remain in stasis for long. As
we've seen in the past -- and caught a glimpse of yesterday with the Graph Search reveal -- Facebook likes to start small, and steadily flesh out its products. Expect the same with voice calling.
And unlike Google Voice and Skype (which is owned by Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500)), Facebook is 100% platform neutral. Facebook (FB) doesn't care if you use its app on an iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry or something crazy like Ubuntu.
In a time when every company is saving the best features of its
products for its own mobile ecosystem, Facebook has the opportunity to
both usurp its direct competition and build out a telecom-slaying voice service.
It will be interesting to watch where this leads.
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