Facebook To Replace Your VoIP Provider? May Be In Near Future!

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Facebook has been experimenting a lot lately. A multi-billions dollar company should not be content with what it has, should it? Last month Facebook started the voice messaging for its iOS Messenger app. Today it has brought voice calling option in its main iOS app. Now users in US and Canada have option to call their online Facebook friends in the main Facebook app.

What is this voice call?

You can see this option when you tap on a friend’s name. If he/she is online, you can do a voice chat from your phone by clicking on the “free call” button. Of course it will cost you more data charges. No, you cannot call a friend on his/her phone number if he/she is online. At least not now. When a user is not online, the “free call” option is greyed out.

Facebook Voice Calling
Pic courtesy: TechCrunch

Bah! Sounds more like Skype and Gtalk

Yes! This was my first reaction as well. What’s the big deal. Skype and Gtalk already has this option where you can voice as well as video chat with online users. With Skype, you can also call on a friend’s phone number (using Skype credits) if he/she is not online. So what’s the fuzz about Facebook providing voice calling option?

Tip of the Zucker…oops…iceberg!

Look at the bigger picture. It could be just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook may be (and it should be) planning to roll out complete voice and video chat option in its mobile app. VoIP is a growing industry and $8 Bn selling price of Skype is a confirmation. Facebook is a social network with over a 1 billion people worldwide. It is the de facto standard in social media industry.

With the rise of smartphones, a huge population has their contacts synced with Facebook. What do you see here? An immense opportunity to utilize them for a VoIP project. After all if you have calling options straight in Facebook, why would you go and search for the same friend in Skype or Gtalk?

With its messenger service for SMS it already has reduced the phone bills for many. And with the calling option, it surely is going to reduce it further. What is your opinion on it? Will it be a hit or a miss?

How to get the new Facebook chat with video calling

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Here is the response of Facebook to Google+. Skype integration into Facebook chat to provide video calling to users.  News was circulating that Facebook is about to launch something “awesome” and it comes exactly one week after the limited release of Google+. Facebook was missing the video call feature for a long time and Skype has a proven technology and experience. The integration seems to be a good add-on for Facebook. From another point of view it can also be seen as Microsoft’s rivalry with Google (Microsoft is the new owner of  Skype and a shareholder in Facebook). News apart, here is how you can get the latest video calling chat on Facebook:

  • Log in to your facebook account
  • Go to
  • Click on Get Started (Facebook can take you from here in steps but still I’ll write it), It will ask you to select a friend to video chat
  • Click on a friend, the chat window opens up
  • On the top of the chat window, there is the known video sign  , click it
  • It will ask you “Set up video calling?”
  • Click on Set Up
  • It will ask you to download a plugin exe file (on Windows)
  • Save the file, Run the file
  • Enjoy your video calling

If your friend does not have video calling installed on his/her computer you have an option of leaving a video message. Cool na?

Question, suggestions and a word of thanks is always welcome. Enjoy :)

How to solve: Skype crashes and won’t start again

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There is strange things going on with Skype since Microsoft took over it. Weirdly, while using, it crashes and will not launch again. And it happens to a lot of people. Probably a problem with Ubuntu. Any ways, since there is no standard solution available, one cannot wait for the new updates from Skype (if any). So folks, here is a quick and dirty trick to solve this problem.

In your home/your_user_name (or simply call it ~ directory), there is a hidden Skype directory. It contains few files and shared.xml is one of them. Either delete this file or rename it. Use either of these commands:

mv ~/.Skype/shared.xml ~/.Skype/shared2.xml 
or 
rm ~/.Skype/shared.xml

After this, start Skype again, enter your login details.

If the problem still persists, try removing this file as well by using this command:

rm ~/.Skype/shared.lck

On Windows:

As suggested by a reader Arri, the same problem can be solved by removing the same shared.xml file from the following location:

C:Users{YOUR_USERNAME}AppDataRoamingSkype

Hopefully this works for you all! Questions, suggestions and feedbacks are welcomed.

Java code for GUI of a chat program

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I worked on the GUI of a chat program in Java. I would like to share the experience as well as codes of my program. The code which I am going to share is a stand alone GUI i.e. its not a complete chat program but just the windows without any connectivity. (I’ll also upload the running version of the complete program sometime later).

It consists of three classes, LogInWindow, ConnectWindow, ChatWindow. The features of these classes are as following:

LogInWindow:

It consists the main and the whole code is run by this class. When it runs for the first time it automatically calls ConnectWindow so that user can provide detail about itself like its name, nick name, port number etc. There are (in this example predefined) a no. of users as buttons. Clicking on a user (Buttons) opens a ChatWindow. When you exit the LogInWindow the whole program exits. The window is named “WeChat”. There are two menu option in menu bar. One is to change status and one is to connect and terminate the chat. Various Status option are:

  • Available
  • Do Not Disturb
  • Away
  • Invisible

Connexion consists of two option: Connect and Terminate. Clicking on Connect allows the user to put info about itself in the ConnectWindow (If user has already done it then it shows the previous entries). Terminate deletes all the previous info about the user.

ConnectWindow:

It allows user to put info about itself. Already discussed in LogInWindow.

User can put the following information:

  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • Nick Name
  • Display Name
  • Status Message
  • Port Number

Pressing Ok Button enters these information. Clicking on cancel simply disposes the window

ChatWindow:

Chat Window class provides different facilities for interacting with other user. It has a text field where user can enter chat. All the text is shown in a text area. There are some buttons for Voice and Video Calls as well. The chat transcript can be saved easily by clicking the save button. Closing the chat window disposes it. And it also gives calls a function while closing the chat window (So that it can be used to pass info about the closing the chat window to some other class/module, if needed).


P.S. You can find the codes here (All the code are in word file. You can copy paste these codes in txt file): GUI Code