Ankit Rawat

Adding any possible video conferencing to your existing social network website is an important task. A lot of options will exist to do so, and there are also many options to take into consideration related to customization or usability. The project will most certainly require an experienced web developer as well as a rather solid platform for this particular component to work from. Another good option which will require a bit less work is to integrate the website with any existing video conferencing tools such as Skype.

1. You should hire a professional developer. Depending on how hard the task will be, the job might require a team of developers. The average costs of such a type of project will vary a lot depending on what is desired but may run into hundreds and hundreds of dollars quite easily. Even if that experienced developer will just insert any existing technology into the actual interface, it still won`t be too cheap. Trying to develop the actual project from nothing may cost even more.
2. Try to use only a canned solution. Some packages of video conferencing software will allow a website to simply “plug” in video conferencing quite easily. A fairly good knowledge of programming or code, however, will most likely require implementing a canned package with the existing social networking website. Customization might be limited. The tricky part may be to have the social network integrate with the actual video conferencing tool. For instance, will just be your “friends” allowed to conference one another? Will more than one cam be allowed to conference? What security measure will be taken to be sure that any random user will not be allowed to hack the cam feed of any other person? Various issues exactly like these ones is the reason why a lot of social networks such as MySpace or Twitter have toyed with the basic idea of adding tools for video conferencing.
3. You may partner with any existing provider of video conferencing by simply adding some widgets. By far, among the easiest solutions is to build a widget which will link the social profile with 3rd-party video conferencing software, such as SkyPe. The user will simply enter their own Skype name in their social profile and the widget will immediately appear on their social profile; this will allow other people who viewed the social profile to get in touch by calling on SkyPe. To program such a widget is quite easy and will add video conferencing to the social network website.