MUMBAI: Social networking site Facebook, in association with Skype, plans to launch a video chat function in the coming week for millions of its users.

The partnership would help Skype usage go up considerably. Currently, Skype has 170 million users, while Facebook has over 750 million active users.

The alliance will also help Facebook become even stickier for users as they start to have voice and video chat as an option to communicate. The product has been built on Skype and will include a desktop component.
 
However, it‘s not clear whether it will work if the user has already installed Skype on the computer, or if additional software will need to be downloaded even if the user already uses Skype.  
 
It was only last week that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had come out with his plans of launching an "awesome" new product next week that has been built by Facebook‘s Seattle team.

Facebook has been introducing various services in order to capture more online users. For instance, it has launched a new payment system, Facebook Credit, in India recently.