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, Insightful)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-04-29 12:20 (#18Q)

I think you're right, that they tried to do away with anonymity on Youtube comments to get people to shape up. I'm not convinced it worked though. It's thrown a bucket of cold water on people who'd otherwise enjoy Youtube more. And the dumb*sses that don't care are still out there posting crap. Youtube has about the worst comments anywhere. Not cool though, the way Google asked you about a hundred times if you wanted to link your Youtube account to your Google account (I said no, every time) and then basically just did it anyway. I avoid Youtube now (made me more productive in life anyway not wasting time there).
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