The app, owned by Fortnite maker Epic Games, lets up to eight people videochat together in virtual rooms, send video messages called “Facemail” and play games. Smaller services like Houseparty, which launched in 2016, think this gives them an opening. Its text-chat system is rudimentary and it gives people exactly two emojis for reacting to others in video - a wave and a thumbs-up. Inviting people to video chats is cumbersome - for instance, Zoom generates an invitation more than 20 lines long that offers a bewildering number of ways to connect (H.323/SIP protocol, anyone?). But the service has always been focused on business users, and it shows.
Zoom, which boasts 300 million users, had the luck to be in the right place at the right time just as millions of employees around the world suddenly found themselves ordered to work from home. There were already several smaller contenders for the throne, and now there’s a big one as well: Facebook. With people’s social lives moved indefinitely online, a bevy of big and small tech companies want to unseat fast-rising Zoom from its perch atop the heap, given security concerns and other issues with the video-calling service. Our friends, coworkers, teachers - and doctors, if we’re lucky - now largely exist as faces in rectangles on our phones and computer screens. (AP) - Amid the coronavirus pandemic, this has become an era of Zoom birthdays, virtual happy hours, FaceTime story times and Google yoga classes. Facebook is stepping into the fray, hoping that its massive user base will give it the needed edge to drown out the competition in this already crowded field.(Facebook via AP) With people’s social lives moved indefinitely online, a bevy of tech companies want to unseat fast-rising Zoom from its perch, given security concerns and other issues with the video-calling service. This image provided by Facebook shows their new video chat service called Messenger Rooms on a mobile phone.
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