Get ready to don your headsets, Facebook (News - Alert) users – because soon you will be able to “voice chat” with other users on your "friends list," for free, with just a click of the mouse.

The increasingly popular social networking site, which now boasts more than 250 million users, has announced that it will soon be launching a new “voice chat” capability powered by Vivox’s VoIP technology.

That means all Facebook users will soon be able to hold live one-on-one (or multiparty) conversations with others on their “friend’s list” – providing, of course, that the “dialed” party is available to take a call. That shouldn’t be too hard to figure out, however, as each user’s availability status, or “presence,” will be known by way of their Facebook page.

According to a report on CNET.com, the new “voice chat” service is currently in beta and will be rolled out sometime over the next few weeks. Users will have to download a plug-in in order for the service to work – and, of course, they will have to use headsets or speakerphones in order to talk to other users conveniently by way of their computers.

Boston-based Vivox, which specializes in bringing voice to online gaming, already provides integrated voice service for virtual worlds like Second Life and EVE Online and boasts 15 million users. In addition to the Facebook voice chat service, the company is reportedly making its technology available to any third-party Facebook application developer, meaning that almost any app, from games to utilities, can have a voice component.

According to the CNET report, Vivox plans to offer free dial-in numbers that will allow anyone to call into an existing conversation, just the same as users can do today with Web-based conferencing services.

As the report points out, it is largely unknown how many Facebook users will make use of the new service. First, many users might not like the idea of using a headset in order to carry on conversations – this has always been one of the main obstacles hindering the adoption of softphone-based VoIP services. Then there’s the question of sound quality, as the voice signals will be delivered over the public Internet on a “best efforts” basis (and it’s been fairly well-established that many of the major carriers tend to downgrade voice services other than their own, even though they’re not really supposed to) and therefore might not be all that good, depending on one’s Internet service (including bandwidth, type of network and carrier) and geographic location.

But on the other hand, the new voice chat service could prove to be wildly popular – if not only for the reason that it lets users make free phone calls (no word yet on whether there will be any limits on call duration). If that’s the case, then there could be issues that arise from a lack of adequate network resources in order to accommodate the potential spikes in voice traffic, which, regardless of newer compression techniques, is known to be extremely bandwidth-intensive. Should tens of millions of users jump on and start using the service all at once, it could result in network congestion – however company officials at Boston-based Vivox say they are ready with a plan, should that massive spike in call volume occur.

As the CNET article points out, integrating voice with Facebook opens up almost limitless possibilities – for example, users can visit e-commerce companies’ Facebook pages and click-to-dial a contact center agent and place an order – without having to switch to the telephone or navigate over to the merchant’s Website. The value to retailers is immense because it enables customers to find them quickly and easily – plus they don’t have to provide the connectivity themselves (i.e. they don’t have to pick up the tab for the toll-free call), as Facebook will be providing it for them for free. Plus Facebook users can voice chat about the products and services they see with other users before making a purchase.

 

There are also new opportunities for gamers – for example, as the CNET article points out, Facebook friends who are having a game of Scrabble or chess can voice chat while they are playing.

The only potential downside of this new service is that, should Vivox decide to monetize it down the road, it will likely change it from a free service to an ad-supported service, where users will be subjected to brief advertisements in order to make a “call.”

Still, this could be a game-changer for the major carriers – and especially for niche VoIP providers such as Skype and Vonage (News - Alert). Given the increasing popularity of social networking, this new form of communication definitely is a threat to their market share.

As TMC (News - Alert) CEO Rich Tehrani pointed out in his August blog post, “The Facebook Threat to Carriers,” Facebook is now “so entrenched that it has replaced telephone numbers as a primary form of communications for many. You could argue FaceBook already has a replaced most every phone company as the network of choice for communications. Skype and Twitter are other competitors in this regard -- but communicating in 140 byte increments seems crude to me -- like using smoke signals.”

For users of Facebook and other social networking sites, those “smoke signals” might well be evolving into one of the most advanced and popular forms of voice communications the world has yet to witness.