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Facebook-to-Facebook calling, instant messaging now in Skype

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Skype’s and Facebook’s friendship is growing.

On Thursday, Skype announced an update to its Windows and Mac OS X apps that enable the Internet calling service to offer users Facebook-to-Facebook video chatting.

It’s a natural move move for Skype, which has powered Facebook’s video chat feature since its debut in July.

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‘Our approach to social is about personal connections with people,’ Rick Osterloh, vice president of product at Skype, said in a blog post. ‘We are on a mission to connect over one billion people and our continued partnership with Facebook brings us one step closer to this goal.’

Those looking to start video chats with their Facebook friends from Skype simply need to sync their accounts from the two services to get the ball rolling. Once that is completed, a user’s Facebook friends will show up alongside the user’s Skype contacts in the app.

‘This new feature lets you maintain social connections with your Facebook friends and compliments previously announced features such as being able to see when your Facebook friends are online, read their status updates and IM them all from Skype,’ Osterloh said.

Video calls placed from Skype can be answered in either Skype or Facebook -- depending on which service the recipient is logged into at the time.

The update also integrates Facebook Messenger for instant messaging from Skype to Facebook.

The increased Skype and Facebook integration is good for Skype’s parent company, Microsoft, which owns a stake in Facebook, partners on ads with the social network and has a deal in place that makes Bing the search engine used inside the world’s most widely used social network.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

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