Skype Gives In: Group Video Chat Now Free, Like Hangouts

by
Anonymous Coward
in internet on (#3JF)
story imageHurray for the free market and its few remaining giant members.

Because of pressure from Google Hangouts, which has offered free group video calls for a while now, Skype has announced they'll begin rolling out free group video calls. Unfortunately they're starting with desktop clients first.

Lifehacker has a brief writeup here , with more information available via the Skype blog .

This is good news for me since I have an Android phone on which I've thus far completely avoided registering a Google account (though I was just about to, since I found out that you can do two-way Hangout chat with a GMail address but WITHOUT having to succumb to Google+).

This is a nice alternative for those who'd rather sell this part of their identities to Microsoft instead of Google, and who have still managed to avoid the incessant +ing of Google.

Score one for heterogeneity.

[Ed. note: Coincidentally, this comes very close on the heels of Google pulling back on Google+ and supposedly moving its Hangouts dev team to Android.]

Re: Great News (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-04-28 21:42 (#189)

Somebody, somewhere once said this about Googleplus and Facebook back when Facebook was forcing you to get and use a facebook.com email address:

"Join Facebook and get an email address shoved down your throat. Get a Gmail account and get a social network shoved down your throat." Same goes for anyone who ever wanted to comment on a youtube video. Crikey - makes me not even want to use Youtube because of that alone. Who wants your youtube comments blasted out to everyone in your network? Not me.
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