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After weeks of teasing users with the promise of a new “awesome” feature, Facebook announced the launch of video calling that will enable 750 million users to video chat with any of their online friends; the result of a new partnership with Skype.

At a press conference with Tony Bates, CEO of Skype, and other Facebook employees at their headquarters in Palo Alto, California, USA, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook's partnership with an outside company like Skype, which was recently bought by Microsoft, represented his company's belief that individual applications are best created by those who specialize in them. He said implementing Skype technology was a better option than Facebook attempting to create its own sub-standard services.

“This stuff is possible because the social infrastructure already exists.”

“We build the infrastructure, we're years ahead in wiring it up, and we're going to enable folks to build world-class apps on top of that,” he said of his company's strategy.

Facebook users don’t need to be Skype account holders to access video calling but would need to a launch a one-time setup. Users can also leave a video message if the call recipient doesn't respond.

In addition to the new video-calling feature, two more advances were rolled out by Facebook; group chat as well as a new template.

The company's chat tool has been redesigned to adjust in size based on the user's browser window to make it easier to chat and users will also have a sidebar that will feature the people they communicate with most often.

At the conference, Zuckerberg said the video calling, group chat, and the new chat design, were the start of “launching season 2011” at Facebook.

Philip Su, a Seattle-based Facebook engineer who worked on the video chat feature, also announced that Facebook-to-Skype client calls are a logical extension is in the cards.

Stevens said that wherever users see a highlighted phone number on Facebook, they would be able to click it and place a voice call.

Facebook now faces increased pressure with Google taking a stab at the social networking market with Google+, which was launched last week and also includes video chat along with a group video chat feature called Hangouts.

Zuckerberg  responded to inquiries of whether Facebook would also be adding a group calling function like Hangouts by saying he wouldn’t “rule anything out” but added that they wouldn’t “undersell” the features they just rolled out, noting that one-to-one chat makes up the majority of video chatting online at present.

“As far as the Google stuff goes, I'm not going to say a lot about Google+ obviously,” the Facebook CEO stated.