Facebook shared a few of those details today.

Mozilla’s goal was to build a Social API that would integrate content from any social network directly to your browser, even when you’re not on the actual social network’s website, Facebook engineer Pamel Vagata said in a post.

Facebook’s implementation keep you connected with your Facebook friends while you surf the wider web.

Facebook Messenger for Firefox is the first Facebook product to use a key new feature of HMTL, WebSockets, at scale. WebSockets enable persistent connections between your web browser and a webserver in a manner that scales well and also uses few resources. Facebook rolled out WebSockets on its existing chat servers but also had to reengineer its front-end Messenger code to eliminate dependencies on code fragments that simple are not available in the browser implementation.

Facebook credits its organizational structure — small groups, independent engineers — with the capability to make the changes quickly.

“Our ability to work with a small team and push code on a daily basis meant we could rapidly iterate on the API design and feature work to get this integration into the wild,” Vagata said.

Facebook is the first major social network to make use of this API, but theoretically, any such site could make use of it. Just a few days ago, Mozilla released a demo of Social API with WebRTC that shows off even more advanced functionality, such as chatting, video chatting and file sharing.

Here’s Mozilla’s overview of its Social API with WebRTC:

photo credit: Βethan via photopin cc

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

10 messages per second to 1,000,000 live users on single, solitary server rack? That’s impressive by any standard, and that’s what Kaazing and Dell were able to achieve with living, dynamically updating webpages.

“Dell came to Kaazing … and asked if we could drive one message per second to one million users,” Kaazing executive vice president John Donnelly said in a statement. “We did just that and then some, achieving 10 messages per second to the same one million users.”

That’s on a single Dell PowerEdge R620 server rack using dual 3.3GHz quad core Xeon CPUs, 32GB of RAM, plus dual 10Gb Ethernet cards and four 1Gb Ethernet network ports.

Dell says that the system, which used TIBCO Enterprise Message Server, “can now support a higher number of users than ever before at speeds never before possible.”

In the old days, web browsers forced users to refresh entire web pages to update a single element are over. Modern web pages, however, enabled by modern web browsers, now allow dynamic updating of individual components. One such protocol is WebRTC (web real-time communication), but the Kaazing software uses the HTML5 WebSocket standard.

To achieve scalable live page element updating is a somewhat new challenge for web servers.

Live updating can create a great experience for end users, but it can also put a massive demand on web server software and hardware that were previously optimized for sending out complete pages every 15 to 50 seconds, but now are getting dozens of small update requests a second.

So 10 million messages per second is impressive. Also impressive is that the companies delivered them from server to client in an average 3.5 milliseconds each.

One little caveat: If you check out Dell’s online configurator for the PowerEdge R620, you’ll notice no 3.3GHz Xeon processors available. The top of the line orderable CPUS are 2.2GHz.

Update: Dell has updated its product ordering space and the new 3.3GHz processor is now available for order.

Spare a thought for the telcos – they’ve had a hard couple of years fighting off VoIP vendors such as Microsoft’s Skype and New York-based Viber, which use the telcos’ networks while directly competing with their services. Now a new player has arrived, and it’s going to challenge both the telcos and the VoIP vendors. It’s called WebRTC.

WebRTC is a technology that lets developers build real-time communication into web pages. While it’s going to affect the telcos, it’s actually the VoIP vendors who now face the real danger, because it brings down the VoIP players’ protective subscription walls. (For example, Skype users can only talk with other Skype users for free).

WebRTC offers a lot of interesting use cases, but they essentially boil down to five:

1. Friends and family calls to people we know. Today VoIP vendors are finding it easy to supplant telcos in this market, where the phone number and address book are replaced with a buddy list and presence indications.

2. Consumer to business calls. In most cases, these calls require a phone number, and as such, pass through a telco’s voice network. VoIP  players don’t have large presence in this space, since it requires the ubiquity and openness of a telco voice service.

3. Business to consumer calls. Whether it’s a call from the kindergarden telling you your child isn’t feeling well, or a telemarketer trying to sell a magazine subscription, these calls again go to the telco’s phone numbering system.

4. Within a business organization. Telcos and VoIPs both still have a foot in this market.

5. Business partners. Calls between organizations tend to take place on a telco’s network. VoIP players usually don’t allow calling outside the boundary of their own user base unless that call is routed to a telco for their own monetization purposes.

Right now, most of a VoIP player’s users and calls comes from the user’s close contacts: friends and family. These are also the people the user is most likely to interact with on social networks. And while players like Skype rely on people having to download the application first in order to use the service, social networks live natively in the web.

Now that WebRTC has arrived, will VoIP players be the ones adopting it wholeheartedly, or will social networks be first to integrate it into their services?

Put simply: How much will Skype be hurting when Facebook comes up with its own video chat service, based on WebRTC?

Skype’s main asset is the large user base already using it for voice and video communications, with 700 million voice and video minutes a day spent by 65 million users who sign in to the service daily.

On the other hand, people spend over 13 billion minutes a day on Facebook (that’s 7:45 hours a month per person with over 900 million monthly active users).

Which smartphone app is more popular? Facebook has both its main Facebook app and Facebook Messenger app (a direct contender to Skype text chatting) ahead of Skype’s app on the iTunes Charts (29 and 35 in comparison to Skype’s number 52 spot in August 2012). On Google Play’s top Free list, Facebook takes first place while Skype is in seventh.

While Skype is smaller than Facebook, its sole focus is real-time communications. It knows the market and the technology better. The only problem is that today it is almost considered an incumbent player and not a market disruptor. It has been slow to introduce new features and capabilities in the past year or two, while Facebook has been evolving and growing almost on a daily basis.

Facebook’s popularity and positioning is bound to give it a head start in changing users’ behavior – we are already used to sharing on Facebook. A lot of us are texting each other through Facebook’s messaging capabilities, so voice and video chatting isn’t far fetched.

From there, offering a Facebook-Out service, click-to-call ads, or a solution that enables people to interact with companies through their pages on Facebook isn’t such a massive step – and critically, it allows Facebook to monetize such a solution.

So if Facebook decides to go it alone with real-time communications and integrate WebRTC into its social network infrastructure, where would that leave Skype? Michelle Maisto on eWeek is right: Facebook could be a Skype killer.

Tsahi Levent-Levi has almost 15 years of experience in the telecommunications, VoIP, and 3G industry as an engineer, manager, marketer, and CTO. He is currently Director of Business Solutions at Amdocs and is responsible for focusing on new and innovative ways carriers can bring value and relevance to their customers. He is a frequent industry blogger on Amdocs Voices, as well as his own blog: BlogGeek.me.

If all goes according to plan, over 50% of all web browsers will support this capability in the next three to four months.

This is the most significant step forward in web browser connectivity since 2004, when Google launched Gmail and AJAX was coined. The Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) approach enabled developers to update the components of a page without the need for full page reloads. This enabled a huge number of new interaction capabilities and was a significant step forward in bringing “native” style applications to the web.

Graphic by Jimmy Lee / jimmylee.info

While HTML5 has already brought many new capabilities to the web, it is WebRTC that will spark the most innovation. The ability to directly connect to other web browser opens a new world of possibilities for web developers, enabling new types of applications in telecommunications, gaming, and any other field involving direct user-to-user interaction.

Today, direct communication between browsers is possible only with third-party plugin software and significant proprietary server infrastructure.

Through an open standards approach, WebRTC integrates browser-to-browser communications directly into the fabric of the Internet. This opens many new possibilities such as:

• Rich image and video apps on mobile browsers (e.g. Instagram or Skype in the browser)
• Citizen journalists could stream breaking news directly from their phones to news outlets
• Web sites could add live support and feedback through one line of code
• Effortless file distribution (e.g. Napster) without software.

Sharing live audio, video, and data will be as simple as viewing a web page.

Developers will be able to add these features with relative ease. As we’ve seen in the past, when development becomes simpler, there’s tremendous growth in entrepreneurial experimentation. We should expect a plethora of new audio and video applications from startups and students who only have a basic understanding of peer-to-peer technologies.

WebRTC will also provide new challenges for government censorship and controlling regimes; the peer-to-peer streams will be very difficult to monitor and shut down. We saw the power of social media during the Arab Spring movement last year; imagine it amplified by secure, real-time transmissions of audio and video.

WebRTC will cause major disruption to the billion dollar markets of video conferencing and Internet telephony. You will no longer need Skype on your desktop or smartphone, nor will you need a complex Webex or a Telepresence system. Skype, Cisco, and Polycom will all see their conferencing technology commoditized.

All of this disruption is predicated on the ease of implementing WebRTC and the inherent low cost of peer-to-peer communications. Key to its proliferation will be web developer adoption. This seems likely as the open standards working group and associated browser vendors are making the API as simple and powerful as possible.

The Internet is about to undergo a new wave of innovation. We’re moving to a world of seamless communication, directly between peers and across all devices. As with previous shifts, this will result in a wave of new applications that will change the way we live, work, and play; get excited about the possibilities.

Arend Naylor is cofounder and CTO of Meetings.io, a video meetings startup in San Francisco. Meetings.io is excited to be developing with the WebRTC framework. Check out the WebRTC meetup group or join the webp2p.org community.

[Top image credit: Molodec/Shutterstock]

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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VLine enables web and mobile developers to integrate high quality, video conferencing into their applications without using Flash or plug-ins. The product provides the necessary tools and cloud services for developers to add instant, live video capabilities into the browser, facilitating Real Time Communication.

“Before if a small time developer wanted to build a high quality video conference app, it was prohibitively expensive,” said CEO Ben Strong in an interview.  “We want to make it easy enough that anyone capable of building a web application is capable of building a video conferencing application. We are helping developers build their own Skype”

Founders Strong, Adam Fineberg, and Prakash Ramakrishna began VLine at the end of 2010 after Google launched their Web RTC project, which provided an open framework for enabling RTC in the browser. Using the open sourced code, the team began building a tool that bundles together all the technology required to build video conferencing capacity into an inexpensive and easy-to-use package.

While Google currently has an API for hangouts, it requires users to log in through Google. Companies that prefer to control their users’ experiences can use VLine to develop their own video platform. This is increasingly important as the degree of online communication escalates. With RTC capabilities becoming a regular feature of web and mobile apps, the challenge of easily enabling video conferencing in the browser is a pain point VLine strives to address.

“Every interesting device now, whether it is a smart phone, a tablet, or a laptop, all have cameras built in that could be used for video conferencing,” Strong said. “Combine this with the emergence of hundreds of social apps where people are interacting in real time, and you see a natural evolution towards the richest possible communication experience, which is video.”

In addition, the team is building an open-sourced platform called GitTogether that will add a video component to developer social network GitHub. Using this API, developers can more effectively communicate with each other and manage projects.

VLine currently has 4 employees and is based in Palo Alto. During the beta period over the next several months, the product will be free of charge. After that, there will be an ongoing service fee. VLine has worked in close collaboration with the Google Chrome team and plans to launch a Javascript browser SDK in July, followed by an iOS SDK later in the summer.

Speaking at the Develop Liverpool conference, Kinlan’s plans could pave the way for cloud-based gaming and open video chat services to make an appearance on the browser, which is currently supported by over 200 million users worldwide. As the popularity of  HTML5 web apps and the Google Chrome Web Store continues to grow, the shift towards a web-based console experience seems completely natural.

Alongside the gamepad, webcam and microphone support will also undergo the plug-and-play treatment, allowing users to connect instantly. It has been rumoured that this will be used to progress the use of Augmented Reality, the use of computer graphics on top of live imagery, which is already being used across a variety of advertisements and gaming platforms.

Google will also look to exploit the abilities of WebRTC, an open-source real-time communications application. This will grant users with the ability to communicate without the need for plug-ins.

With Google Chrome updates appearing every six weeks, there’s plenty for web developers to get excited about at the moment. Will Google launch a HTML5 gaming console? Will it wait for others to take advantage of the structure it’s slowly unravelling to the public? Either way, Google Chrome’s stock continues to rise.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Having voice and video calling through a web browser would eliminate the need for a stand-alone program like Skype, the current leader in worldwide video calling. Users would instead be able to use Web-based apps to make video calls.

“Our goal is to enable Chrome with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs,” Henrik Andreasson, a Google programmer, wrote on Friday. “We are working hard to provide full RTC support in Chrome all the way from WebKit down to the native audio and video parts.”

If possible, Google wants the open-source WebRTC protocols to be integrated into all Web browsers, which would enable developers—or even Google itself—to build voice and video chat programs directly into those browsers. It will first add WebRTC to Chrome, then work with allies like Mozilla and Opera to add those programs to their respective browsers.

Google already offers video and voice chat through its Gmail Web mail service, so any Gmail user on any browser can voice or video call other Gmail users. But this would take the concept further by adding real-time abilities to the browser and open the possibilities to new types of Web apps and video services.