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: 2, Informative)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-04-29 10:24 (#18J)

Not that I approve, but the reason I believe they linked YouTube and G+ was specifically because of the YouTube comments. Hasn't seemed to change anything, but I seem to remember reading they were hoping that if people had to use an account linked to them personally rather than anonymous posting they'd think a little harder about leaving troll comments. Too bad the generation that's leaving the majority of troll comments on YouTube is a generation that doesn't care about privacy anyway so they don't care that in 20 years they'll have a ton of public postings that any employer will fined in 5 minutes that shows what kind of person they really are.
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