MySpace Creator: We Had Video Chat Years Ago

News that Facebook is teaming up with Skype must have sounded like deja vu to MySpace founder Tom Anderson. In a Google+ post, he notes that MySpace partnered with Skype in 2007 and had video chats three years before that, reports PC Magazine. But Anderson isn't joining the critics knocking Facebook for coming late to the video party: "The point is that people weren't really ready for it back then—now is the time, and FB has the userbase," he writes. "The large userbase (750 million) paired with a simple integration of the arguably the best voice/video tech (Skype) is what makes this news."

Anderson, who has had made clear he's no longer a fan of the recently sold MySpace, says only time will tell whether Facebook's Groups ("like an old-school Yahoo Group with a Forum built-in") or Google+ Circles ("like an email distribution list-meets Twitter with better commenting") will prevail. "The two are actually very similar, but each probably does certain things better than the other," he writes. "Thinking about what each model does better is probably the key to unlocking what 'model' is going to 'win.'" (More Tom Anderson stories.)