Mark Zuckerberg divulged his "awesome" news at a press conference in Facebook's Palo Alto, California headquarters: Skype would be bringing video-chat capabilities to Facebook, which, he says, now has 750 million users.

The partnership will allow Skype users to see Facebook updates within the Skype application, and Facebook users to video chat with each other within the social networking site. Facebook Chat will support both traditional person-to-person calls and multi-person group chats. Users can initiate a video call simply by selecting the 'video call' button at the top of any Facebook Chat window.

The new Facebook Chat includes a sidebar that lists the people each user messages the most. For a multi-person chat, one of the most requested features in Facebook, users can just click Add Friends to Chat.

"A few months ago, we started working with Skype to bring video calling to Facebook," said Phillip Su, a Facebook engineer in a post to Facebook's official blog. "We built it right into chat, so all your conversations start from the same place."

The video-calling feature will be available in over 70 different languages. The service will only be available to everyone over the next few weeks. At present, the service can be accessed at http://www.facebook.com/videocalling

Zuckerberg's announcement has been closely watched by industry observers since this would be the first time the Facebook founder has gone public since search giant Google Inc. released its well received Google+ social network last week. Currently in an invite-only testing phase, Google+ mimics Facebook while adding new features including Circles and Hangouts.

Aside from having Circles, which enables users to organize contacts into groups for sharing, across various Google products and services, Google+ offers Hangouts, a video chatting service that Facebook did not have.

The Skype deal thus is a boon to both Facebook and Skype and even Microsoft Corp.

Skype is expected to have difficulty finding itself relevant as Hangouts is featuring the same service at no cost. Skype has more than 160 million registered users for its software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chats over the Internet. However, while Skype also offers video conferencing, Skype required a Premium membership that ranges from $4.49 to $8.99 per month.

Facebook is still the most popular social networking site with 750 million users. Google+ has created so much hype, although its too early to gauge its numbers as it is still in the beta phase.However, industry observers have mostly agreed that Google+ is the most serious threat to Facebook's dominance.

In May, Microsoft signed a deal to pay $8.5 billion in cash to buy the company that owns Skype. The Bill Gates-founded company said it plans on integrating Skype functions into Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft's dominance with the Word, Excel and Powerpoint and other office apps have been threatened with the arrival of Google's productivity suite. Microsoft late last month launched its newest cloud service, Office 365 -- consisting of online versions of Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Lync -- to answer the growing threat of the Google App.

Microsoft is a shareholder of Facebook. In 2007, Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook.