Facebook steps in as rival to Zoom on video chats

OAKLAND, Calif. — During the coronavirus pandemic, this has become an era of Zoom birthdays, virtual happy hours, FaceTime story times and Google yoga classes. Friends, coworkers, teachers — and sometimes doctors — now frequently exist as faces in rectangles on phones and computer screens.

With people’s social lives moved indefinitely online, a bevy of big and small tech companies want to unseat fast-rising Zoom from its perch atop the heap, given security concerns and other problems with the videocalling service. There were already several smaller contenders for the throne, and now there’s a big one as well: Facebook.

Zoom, which boasts 300 million users, had the luck to be in the right place at the right time just as millions of employees around the world suddenly found themselves told to work from home. But the service has always been focused on business users, and it shows. Inviting people to video chats is cumbersome — for instance, Zoom generates an invitation more than 20 lines long that offers a bewildering number of ways to connect (H.323/SIP protocol, anyone?). Its textchat system is rudimentary and it gives people exactly two emojis for reacting to others in video — a wave and a thumbs-up.

Smaller services like Houseparty, which debuted in 2016, think this offers an opening. The app, owned by Fortnite maker Epic Games, lets up to eight people video-chat together in virtual rooms, send video messages

(AP/Wilson Ring/Zoom) Members of the Vermont House of Representatives convene Thursday in a Zoom videoconference for the lawmakers’ first full parliamentary online session.