Facebook in 2011: Video Calling and Payments Between Friends, Revisited

Video calling, July 2011

The announcement was a partnership: Facebook added a video call button to its chat, powered by a well-known internet calling service. You clicked call, installed a small plug-in the first time, and had a one-to-one video conversation in the browser. This site's post noted the obvious: hundreds of millions of people who already had their friends listed could now call them without exchanging usernames on a separate service. It was also a shot at a rival social network that had launched group video hangouts a week earlier. Group calling came to Facebook later; the 2011 version was strictly two people.

TechCrunch's report from the launch event on 6 July 2011 records the details that the headlines skipped. A Call button appeared on every friend's profile between Message and Poke. Nobody needed an account with the calling partner; the plug-in installed in a few seconds and the connection was immediate. If the other person did not pick up, you were offered the chance to leave a video message. The same day Facebook rolled out a new chat sidebar that took over the right-hand side of the screen, which is how most people first noticed the feature. Asked about group calls, the company's chief executive said one-to-one calls made up the vast majority of video calling and declined to rule anything out.

Payments between friends

The payments story was thinner and, in hindsight, early. In 2011 Facebook ran a virtual currency for games and apps, and there was repeated talk, some of it from the company and some from analysts, of extending it to payments between people. This site reported it as a launch of a payments-between-friends service; the accurate version is that peer payments were being explored. The feature that matched the headline arrived in 2015, inside the standalone messaging app, letting friends send money from a linked debit card. It was later withdrawn in some countries as the company refocused on payments to businesses and, briefly, on a digital currency project that did not launch.

The 2015 launch, announced on the company's newsroom in March of that year, was narrower than the 2011 speculation. It was United States only, free, and tied to a debit card issued by a US bank. You tapped a dollar sign in a conversation, entered an amount, and the recipient added their own debit card to collect. The transfer went out at once and took one to three business days to land, depending on the bank. A PIN could be set for extra security. It rolled out over the following months across the two main phone platforms and the desktop site. Four years after the first talk of payments between friends, this was the feature, and it looked like a bank transfer wearing a chat interface.

What each 2011 story became

The survey about paying by phone

A third post from the same period relayed a survey finding that a large majority of North Americans said they were willing to use their phone to pay for things in shops. In 2011 almost none of them could. Phone payments in shops needed near-field chips in phones, terminals that accepted them, and banks willing to put cards into phone wallets, and those pieces took most of the decade to line up. The survey was right about appetite and said nothing about timing, which is the usual shape of a technology survey.

Why the plug-in disappeared

The small download that the 2011 feature needed was the normal price of real-time video in a browser at the time. Browsers could show video files but had no standard way to capture a camera, negotiate a connection and stream it to another person. That changed with WebRTC, a set of browser interfaces for real-time communication developed at the W3C and the IETF. The W3C published it as a full Recommendation in January 2021, with a revised edition in March 2025. Once calling was built into the browser, a plug-in became a liability rather than a feature, and every service that had relied on one dropped it.

What the two stories got right

Both bets, that people wanted to call and pay within the app where their friends already were, turned out correct. What the 2011 stories could not see was that the winning venue would be the phone messaging app rather than the desktop social network, that video would go from plug-in novelty to something everyone did daily within a decade (helped enormously by 2020), and that payments would fragment by country, with bank-run instant transfer systems winning in some places and messaging-app payments in others.

What a 2011 product post looks like from 2026

Read fifteen years later, these posts are a small lesson in how technology news is built. Each took a press event or a survey and reported it as settled. One of the three claims was true on the day, one came true four years later in a different form, and one was true only about attitudes. All three took the announcement's own framing as the story.

• Partnership announcements describe two companies' hopes on one day. The 2011 launch was a partner's plug-in inside a social network; the calling that people use in 2026 is built into the apps themselves.
• A headline with 'will add' or 'launches' should be checked against what a user could actually do that day. In July 2011 that was a two-person call after a plug-in install, and nothing at all for payments.
• Surveys of willingness measure the ceiling of demand, never its timing. The gap between wanting to pay by phone and being able to was most of a decade.
• The venue matters more than the feature. Calling and paying both won, but inside phone messaging apps, which barely existed as a category when the posts were written.

This is one of the archived tech news stories. The privacy worries of the time are covered in the Please Rob Me story, and the platform contest that shaped mobile apps in Android vs iOS in 2011. For the comment threads those features fed, read the comment culture retrospective.