Facebook just keeps sinking its tendrils deeper into every online business in the world. After announcing major partnerships with both Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to integrate Facebook Connect, the social network’s application program interfaces (APIs), into their respective Web portals, Facebook is now preparing to cement its status in the internet telephone service business. The Wall Street Journal‘s All Things Digital blog is reporting that Mark Zuckerberg’s multi-billion dollar independent business is about to begin a deep partnership with Skype, the Internet telephony company previously owned by eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY). The union will bring Facebook connect to the VoIP service and SMS text messaging and voice chat to the social network.
Sources close to the situation say that the new partnership will greatly expand on the small-scale integration tests that Facebook and Skype have experimented with over the past 24 months. The new service, set to launch with Skype version 5.0 later this fall, will now provide Facebook’s 500 million users with access to Skype’s own base of 560 million registered users. While there’s undoubtedly a significant amount of crossover between the two audiences, the new partnership will still give both services newfound strength.
Skype said at the beginning of August that they were in the process of raising $100 million or more for an initial public offering. The new partnership with Facebook should only make a Skype IPO more attractive to possible investors. Facebook’s international appeal will also hopefully increase as a result of its integration with the latest version of Skype. As a cultural force in the United States, Facebook is almost unstoppable, but its native success hasn’t been equaled elsewhere in the world. While Skype has a significant following through Western and Eastern Europe as well as India, Facebook has limited penetration, losing out to other social networks like Google Inc.‘s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Orkut. As the company grows its global audience, investors will undoubtedly become even more anxious for a Facebook IPO.
As of this writing, Anthony Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here.
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