As I was scrolling through the Comm 101 blogs, I stumbled upon Jasmine Chan’s blog and her post “‘Sky-Book’:The Merger of Facebook and Skype.” It wasn’t until I read her post that I realized that Facebook and Skype had merged to create this new feature called “Sky-Book.” Although I never use Facebook chat, none of my friends even talk about video chatting with friends via Facebook; it’s always done through Skype.
I agree with Jasmine when she suggests that many consumers would rather use each social media for it’s previously known usage: Facebook for social networking and Skype for video chatting. I feel that integrating new forms of social media may sound great, but people are drawn to the brands whose products they easily recognize and associate with. For example, people go to Starbucks for coffee or Tim Hortons for doughnuts. My assumption would be that Facebook wanted to keep up with Google+, a competing networking site that has video-chat abilities. Although this merge may be useful to some, others may not even bother to click on that icon and continue to use the two media outlets for their designated purposes.Disregarding my opinion, only time will tell if this feature will be successful or not.
Sources: (http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Make-Skype-calls-to-all-your-Facebook-friends-2289090.php, Jasmine’s blog)
