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).
Post Comment
Subject
Comment
Captcha
What is the 2nd number in the list thirty six, 10 and thirty three?