A week after the successful launching of Google’s social media networking site, the Google+, Facebook upgrades its local chat feature into video-chat one. Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, officially announced their partnership to Skype which is known as the most popular Internet video-chat provider.

Facebook has three new upgrades or enhancements particularly in its chat feature which include video calling, group chatting, and new design for the whole chat system. Mark discussed in detailed about Facebook’s new chat feature. He said that the video calling is free to all connected users of the social site. There is a call button in upper-right corner of each Facebook page and as the user clicks it, the video chat window will launch.

The group chat is considered as an add-on feature to the existing chat functionality of Facebook. As the user started to chat with a friend in Facebook, there is a button that will allow him to add another friend to chat with. This group chat functionality enables users to save their time in socializing with their friends. This also gives opportunities to businesses and other freelancers to collaborate and discuss simultaneously important topics, events, and information among of their organization members, colleagues, and even customers.

The last upgrade, but not the least, is the redesigned Facebook’s chat window. The new chat window is now more organized. The friends list in the window can now vary in size relative to the user’s browser window. It will list user’s online friends as well as those offline ones who were user sent message most with.

Also during the announcement of Facebook’s new features, Tony Bates who is the CEO of Skype described Facebook as mini-Skype client having a video-chat feature that is obviously embedded in a more attractive way. This excites people who joined in the event to broadcast and globally spread the news about the newly configured chat of Facebook.

As the video-chat feature already available in Facebook, many users started to use the video call and upgraded their chat window. And as days go by, many feedback had been posted in each user’s Facebook page. Some are appraising the new features but others are not. Maybe because they are not yet comfortable with the new design of chat window and keep comparing it with the old one or they are not totally satisfied with the video calling feature of Facebook comparing with their stand along Skype account.

Enhancements in functionality of a certain social media networking site are necessary enable to keep the competition among other social sites. Some social sites are need to make partnership with a third party company or provider for specific tool to add-up important and useful functions in the site. Just like Facebook that upgrades its chat system into a more interactive one to compete with one of the major features of Google+ which is the Hangouts. Whether a Facebook user enjoy or not the new chat feature still the site has the largest number of members and keep gaining profit from it.