You might have heard about Skype and Facebook's recent integration which provides video calling to Facebook friends through Skype's infrastructure. While we're not the Facebook-addicted folk here at developerFusion, we can't help but be interested at how these two companies who are masters at their own games provide video availability to over three quarters of a billion people worldwide.
Skype have been blogging about the way that the Skype and Facebook integration runs under the hood. The service requires a download for Facebook users, which in essence downloads a cut-down Skype client and browser plugin to enable the Facebook web page to talk to the client.
Under the hood, the Skype client is just that - a mini Skype version which has had all of the UI elements stripped out. Facebook uses a special Skype API to create an anonymous user account for video chats for a user, whose credentials are then passed on to the Skype client for login in the background. When both users have downloaded the client, the call is connected through Skype's standard infrastructure - peer to peer connections, firewall busters and all.
It hasn't been a simple engineering problem for Skype though - while their peer to peer architecture theoretically scales widely, it still requires some centralised nodes for authentication, negotiation and initialisation of calls. This architecture has been beefed up with new servers to support the expected influx of people making video calls.
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