Facebook gets Voice powered by T-Mobile

Well iam back, it’s been such a long time since I updated this blog. Professional and personal commitments kept me away from updating the blog. Sincere apologies to all the folks who had sent me mails requesting to start blogging again. Well Iam back. I guess year 2011 is turning out be to exciting times for startups. BTW, I have changed my blog address from latestgeeknews to 4Gwireless for all the good reasons. More on that later.


Coming back to the hot news that hit the stand today, T-Mobile and Vivox launched one touch- calling within Facebook called Bobsled. The new application provides 500 million Facebook users to call each other without worrying about knowing each other’s phone number. Bobsled is not the first application to provide this type of service. Jajah, Vonage and others have launched similar service earlier. In fact Skype and Facebook were rumored to be working closely to bring Voice and SMS integration. Also couple of months back there were rumors about Facebook testing its own Voice Chat.


So what does Bobsled offer, for now using Bobsled app Facebook users can place voice calls to all their friends through the Facebook chat with just one click. The application eliminates the need for dialing/remembering the phone number. Simply clicking the friends name will start the conversation. So with this app, users can call any of their across the globe for free. In addition to voice calling, the application will let you leave a voice message to your friends and family when they are not available. A cute little feature to leave happy birthday, anniversary etc voice greetings and post the greeting on friend’s wall for all to hear.

The initial feature set of Bobsled is limited. However in the near future, T-Mobile plans to unveil Video chat, call termination to mobile and landline and offer applications on smartphones and tablets across various mobile platforms.

Though we have seen similar services on Facebook, this one is big and important because it’s coming from an operator. What this means is that Operators are getting serious about Social Integration, and Bobsled app is a great leap forward in that direction. I was skeptical about voice calling widgets on Facebook few years back, iam thinking positive this time. I still root for Video Chat and am sure Facebook is working on it as I write this article.