Watch out Skype…
here comes Vivox with a voice chat application for facebook.
Check out Vivox’s youtube tutorial for Firefox or for Internet Explorer.
Now alive and running in Beta, Vivox’s voice chat does just what it sounds like – it allows facebook friends to chat by voice. With a very low switching cost, and a quite familiar platform to the 300 million facebook users, Vivox’s competition with Skype may be quite intense.
Personally, my single switching cost would be that Vivox voice chats are only supported on Firefox and Internet Explorer. This may be a disappointment for me as a Mac fan, after getting so used to using Safari. Relatively speaking, though, this switching cost constitutes no major complaint.
To my mind, the more significant factor relates to network effects. I would not call this traditionally tight network effects, since there’s no major issue of complementary products or compatibility here. Still, in order for businesses to switch over to using Vivox for voice chat, they need their network of colleges and co-workers to use Vivox as well. The more professionals move over to Vivox, the more users they will attract. Vivox set up their application so that uou can invite non-facebook friends to dial into a conference chat room, via a telephone number, thus decreasing their network effects. Even so, the question of when and if business professionals will really switch over remains.
In the meantime, before we see businesses’ reactions to Vivox, Skype can work on retaining its customer base. The Facebook model first became popular with college students, but took a while to generate its popularity as a social networking tool for businesses. Let’s wait and see what happens with Vivox.
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