Facebook plays catch up with Google+: Skype deal and unofficial Google circles rip-off

With the a rumoured deal with Skype and an unofficial plug-in designed to replicate Google+'s circles features both being revealed in the same day, many analysts have speculated that Facebook is already playing catch up with Google's new half-launched social networking service.

Rumoured Skype deal

A rumour surfaced today speculating that Facebook has been in talks with Microsoft owned Skype about a new video chat service.

The news comes after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised Facebook users that a new "awesome" feature would be appearing on the site on 6 July.

The new collaboration would reportedly build on the work done in the two services original collaboration back in October 2010. In the team-up Facebook partnered with Skype on Skype 5.0, integrating parts of the two services to allow user's to sign in with Facebook and then connect to their friends through Skype. The SkypeMe application for Facebook was subsequently added, allowing user to Skype call contacts from Facebook.

Google circles rip-off

Named Circle Hack, the new unofficial Facebook plug-in is a self-described "one-night experiment with Javascript. It was created without official licence by a team of Facebook engineers and was designed to bring similar functions to Google+'s Circles features.

The plug-in allows you, as with Google Circles, to drag and drop contacts and friends into various circles at the bottom of your page -- the idea being that it's a quick and intuitive way to manage your online friends/colleagues.