Skype Gives In: Group Video Chat Now Free, Like Hangouts
Hurray 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.]
This is yet another way that the good Pipedot folks (which I assume means Bryan) do a better job than either Slashdot or SN. Rather than slap up my submission, they edited it well, adding a short paragraph with two links (whereas I had only provided the Lifehacker URL) and also leaving an Editor's Note with some interesting background info.
Simple stuff, sure, but it's indicative of care and quality, and I appreciate it.
Again, though, we've got no article or comment volume to speak of. :(