On July 7, the empire struck back: Facebook announced that it had partnered with Skype to create a new video-chat feature for Facebook users.
"The truth is, you have to be easy to use," says Bryan Gonzalez, director of the social-media lab at the University of Southern California's Entertainment and Technology Center. "As technology becomes more complex, users stay the same. And why should we expect them to keep up? They're buying these products. They don't want to have to read a 500-page manual to learn how to use them."
Skype lets you make audio and video phone calls via the Web, mostly for free, and cheap over-the-Web calls to landlines. Around since 2003, it's a relative graybeard in the Web world. And it has more than 660 million registered users. "But more people would have used this great product," Gonzalez says, "if you didn't have all the user-name and sign-in protocols. People want to get at it and use it without that fussiness." Now Facebook users have it - all 750 million-plus of them.
"Facebook is trying to increase its ubiquity," says Gonzalez, "and the stickiness of the site." (Translation: the ability of a website to make the user stay longer.)
Google+ is by invitation only right now, a "soft" or limited release. "That's part of the excitement," says Casey Osborn, 23, who works at a nonprofit in Center City. "It's interesting to be part of something in its beginning stages."
Zack Wiener, 21, a Swarthmore student who lives in Baltimore, says: "It's one of those things where I said, 'Well, if everyone's hopping on the bandwagon, I'll do it, too.' It's interesting, but still very much in the works."
It's also an aggressive bid to fill some gaps in Facebook. Such was the stampede to try the test version of Google+ that the site momentarily ran out of disk space. It had 10 million registered users two weeks later.
