Skype 5.3 Beta

Skype 5.3 Beta finally shows some direct integration with Facebook chat. We all new it was coming as Facebook’s answer to Google+ Hangouts feature. I’ve just installed it tonight, and it gives me two separate contact lists, one for my regular Skype contacts, and one for my Facebook friends.

Voice chat seems to be integrated into it so far, I am not sure about video. I just installed it, and I only saw options for voice. I tried to do a voice chat, and the connection immediately failed, so it’s obviously not fully there yet. It’s probably just the ground work for the impending voice system. I wasn’t expecting too much as this is the first release where it starts to integrate with the Facebook real-time chat system, rather than just wall posts and updates.

If they are going to catch up with what Google already has with their system, they still have a lot of work ahead of them. I don’t think they have much time left to do it either, as the Google+ invite system is finally fully functional without hacks or tricks. This tells me that Google+ will likely be going live very soon. Either that, or there will be so many invites passed out as it wouldn’t really matter.

Story Ideas

My hand is finally feeling better, and now I must get down to the task of writing again. I’m working on story ideas, but nothing fully formed has come to fruition as of yet. As of now, I’m merely collecting plot and character ideas and writing them down. They don’t all work together, but that’s okay. The stuff I don’t use will just go into future projects. I really wish I had some nice tools for keeping these ideas neatly organized on my computer beyond just many documents.

Facebook + Skype?

In a smooth move to add video chat capabilities to Facebook, it appears they have teamed up with Skype to power a web-based video chat conference system that seems to be very similar to what Google has going on with their Google Talk powered Hangouts. I’ve not seen the Facebook video chat system yet, but if they can get it up and running publically before Google+ has a chance to go fully live, Google+ plus may fail the way of Orkut. I’m willing to bet money that most of you out there don’t even know what Orkut is.

Google+

Finally got my invite to Google+. It looks interesting, has a lot of nice features and what not. As the beta is still pretty early, most of the people I know do not yet have access too it. Only one of my friends currently has a beta account. Without that community of friends, it’s really hard to test and validate how well the features perform, or what kinds of uses they bring to the users. I do like it, but it’s definitely designed to be used with more players. For this reason, I’m withholding my final judgment on it as a whole.