Voice Over IP, Small Business VoIP | Blue Ocean Technologies

Google and Facebook Unveil New Video Chat Features

In the past 2 weeks, Facebook and Google have added video conferencing to their suite of services, bringing video capabilities to millions of new users.

Facebook has teamed with Skype to offer video chatting to its 750,000,000 members. All you have to do is download a Java file and you are up and running. Now, on the right side of your Facebook page, you see users who are online and you can start chatting away--either with the old messaging system or with the new video chat feature.

Google rolled out its new “Google+” service, and the early reviews have been interesting. Mainly, Google+ allows you to sort your friends, so you can filter and post messages to different groups (imagine sharing one set of posts with your friends and one set with your co-workers). But there is also a feature called “Hangouts” that let you start a video chat with each circle of friends. If you have a “Work” circle, you can start a hangout that everyone in that circle can click into for a quick and easy video-conferencing solution.

There are a lot of new things popping up on the video front. Do you plan on implementing any of these new features in the near future?

Testimonials

The unified communications in Outlook has increased productivity in allowing us to respond to clients more efficiently and speed up access to voicemails and faxes. The call history has enabled us to ensure that we are capturing all client call time and has also made it more efficient in returning calls. The caller ID functionality has allowed some individuals who were using assistants to screen calls to be able to do this themselves and better manage time. The presence management has helped in allowing us to locate employees and know when they will be available.

- Joel W. Lake, CPA
Jamison, Money, Farmer & Company, P.C.