So today Facebook’s video chat went live. I saw the headline on Hacker News and minutes later my mom popped up on Facebook chat, so what better time to give it a whirl. I hit download to give it a try, and after grabbing a jar file and running an install procedure we were up and running. The chat went pretty well, although it did hang and jitter a couple times. It got me wondering though, is this using my installed skype, or did it install a second copy of skype somewhere, or are they bundling the skype protocols in some kind of library? As any curious geek would, I started checking things out.

The download link grabs a file called FacebookVideoCalling.jar that’s only 27840 bytes in size, so it seemed highly unlikely that this was the entire codec. After scoping out the jar file a bit I found that it uses LiveConnect to let the java applet communicate with the javascript dom in the browser.

  protected JSObject util;
  // ...
  this.window = JSObject.getWindow(this);
  // ...
  String str1 = getParameter("appid");
  String str2 = getParameter("userid");

This way they can get your Facebook user ID, and interestingly they also grab an application ID. With this information they formulate a signed request to download the application. The interesting thing to note is that this installer supports two applications:

    if (paramString.equals("com.facebook.peep"))
      return this.window.getMember("VideoChatPlugin");
    if (paramString.equals("com.facebook.vibes")) {
      return this.window.getMember("MusicDownloadDialog");
    }

The video chat plugin, called peep, is what is downloaded now. At some point in the future they seem to be prepared to download another app though, called Facebook Vibes. I searched around to see what this is all about, and it seems that this is an unannounced feature that has yet to be released. The vibes app connects with a music download dialog in the page though, so I’m guessing that with this release we are seeing the seeds for Facebook’s upcoming music offering.

It’s too late to look into this further and I still haven’t found the codecs, but anyways, you heard it here first: Facebook Vibes.

Update

For anyone that was wondering about the video chat, the installer on OSX puts two apps in /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/Facebook/video/1.0.0.7154: FacebookVideoCalling.app, and FacebookVideoCalling.webplugin. The app has a skype icon and seems like it is a normal executable, but when I try to run it nothing happens. It looks like they could have a standalone chat client in the works though. Inside the web plugin the actual executable is called SkypeWebPlugin. Makes you wonder why skype hasn't offered a web chat plugin in the past?