Facebook announced video chat integration powered by Skype yesterday, introducing a new way to communicate on the global social network.  It’s a major point of integration for both services, especially for Skype.  When it comes to integrating with such a stringently formatted network like Facebook, there’s some challenges and opportunities on Skype’s part, and we explored a bit of that potential yesterday looking at the big data angle.

Skype followed up with me this morning, fleshing out the technological requirements for laying out this level of integration, and also revealing some of the details around bringing a project of this caliber to scale.  In fact, it’s an important topic for Skype to share with the public, as they posted a blog outlining some additional details regarding their software, compatability and platform as it pertains to Facebook integration and beyond.

This all centers around Skype’s desktop software, which has been stripped down and re-formatted for use in Facebook’s social network.  Skype essentially created a plug-in that works on Facebook, leveraging their existing REST API to port the necessary features for this point of integration.  This enables Facebook servers to grab necessary login info, while also providing the experience that’s in line with Facebook’s present set up.

The plug-in actually consists of two distinct parts; one is the runtime, which is the standalone minature Skype client, and the other is the browser plug-in.  The runtime offers the simple API access through an RPC mechanism, while the browser support exposes the app’s APIs to JavaScript in order to access from within Facebook’s site.  This maintains Skype’s technology, and extends the features necessary to offer video chat within Facebook.

But getting the app inside Facebook isn’t enough.  As founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed during the announcement yesterday, the social network claims 750 million users worldwide, giving Skype quite a challenge in terms of scaling out its service.

As Skype’s Chief Technology Strategist Dr. Jonathan Rosenberg recalls, “there’s all kinds of problems involved in scaling up.  Facebook is a massive network, and Skype is a bit smaller.  It’s hard for anyone to beat that size.  We face the potential that users could double or more the number of Skype users overall.  It’s a major scalability challenge.”

As we noted, Facebook is relying heavily on Skype’s existing P2P capabilities, which have powered the VoIP service successfully so far.  Skype addresses this at the server level, engineering it for bandwidth and server count, making good use of dedicated supernodes–the infrastructure that connects Skype users.

Real-time video communications certainly poses a challenge for all related services, putting loads on “upload and download bandwidth of the participants as well as the CPU and RAM of the client computers,” as Paltalk CEO Jason Katz explains.  He goes on to describe some of the challenges that go into bringing a service like this to scale, saying that “chat service should be available to everyone on the web and not exclusive to any single provider.

“A good case study is iChat, where you can only interact with others on the iChat platform.  skype via Facebook may face some of these same challenges.  Creating web-based URLs for each chat is an obivous way that others have solved the issue so that anyone with the URL can join the chat no matter what service or hardwhare they’re using.”

Skype may face some of these challenges on Facebook, but it’s certain that this isn’t the only point of access Skype plans to maintain.  The timing of this team-up was also well-fated, as Skype’s been increasing the frequency of its updates across several points of access.  In recent weeks Skype’s released SkypeKit for developers, added video chat to its Android app, and launched video chat on the world’s largest social network.  It seems Microsoft has plenty to be proud of, having acquired Skype less than two months ago.  But many of the initiatives now being released were in progress long before Skype became part of Microsoft’s family (the deal isn’t even finalized yet).