Lots of rumours whizzing around the net at the moment regarding the announcement from Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook is going to be announcing some awesomeness next week. When next week? No idea. I was amused to read that "A Facebook spokesman declined to provide further details about Zuckerberg's comments." (From the Reuters link previously given) This makes me think of some poor guy in the Facebook PR dept who has absolutely no idea what's going on and is doing his best not to look like a goldfish.
There are various possibilities. Given the complete lack of a really good Facebook app for the iSomething we could be looking at something in this arena. That'll be fun yes, but not exactly awesome. It's more a question there of 'what took you so long?'. Some people have speculated that it might well be a method to add photographs to your facebook account via a smartphone - but again, there's nothing new about that - you can do it with Flickr already. Certainly not awesome.
My money is on the third option, which is that we'll finally get face to face video chat within Facebook. This is something that has been lacking now for a very long time, and Facebook chat is pretty creaky at the best of times, so they have to do something to improve it. A linkup with Skype, or bringing Skype into Facebook by some sort of embedding system would work. Given the 'hangout' feature of Google+ which I think is by far the killer feature, Skype and Facebook have to come up with something to fight back. Certainly Skype is worried, given that I just had an email from them offering me a free months worth of Skype calls. It's great - but is it awesome? I can't get that excited about it, since it's functionality that's been around for years. It's another 'what took you so long?' moment for me. Unless they're going to do something spectacular with it, but I can't quite see what at this stage.
So, that's where the smart money is going at the moment. Face to Face Facebook calls.
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