I’m sure you’ve already heard of the new Skype 5.0 that was released the previous week. The main ‘new’ feature for me (I’m not a heavy Skype user) is the integration with Facebook. By connecting Skype and Facebook you could call Facebook friends, send them SMS messages and view feeds in Skype. You could also post to your wall and more.

Of course, I have decided to try the new Skype. I downloaded it and noticed two things. First, that you need to register to download the program (the registration wasn’t needed for the last version I downloaded) and that for some reason my download page was in German. I installed the program and tied to test the Facebook integration. First, I’ve had some problems which weren’t solved by a few program restarts. Here’s what was wrong and how I managed to solve it.

When I clicked the Facebook tab, the text about the integration is displayed and a button to actually do it. I clicked the button, and the Facebook login form displayed. Here comes the first surprise – I couldn’t type into the form! It looked like the tab froze. I could select other tabs and they were working, but the new Facebook tab was dead. Later I found a solution: I had to maximize the Skype window and the form started to work. When it didn’t work again, I just restored the window and it worked again. Crazy, anyway.

I logged in, allowed Skype to access a lot of private information from Facebook, and have briefly tested the integration. I was mainly disappointed at the speed of it – the Internet Explorer that is run in Skype to show Facebook page has shown me warnings about an unresponsive script several times. My CPU usage spiked to over 70% at that time. When I confirmed the unresponsive script question, the CPU level was back to normal and the functionalities in Skype worked as supposed. Crazy, again.

Apart from this extremely bad user experience I didn’t find anything special about having Facebook in Skype. I clicked a few ‘Call’ and “SMS’ buttons in the peoples list but they all needed credit in order to really do something.

I removed Facebook integration with Skype less then 10 minutes from enabling it. I think I won’t miss it at least until the new, fixed version of Skype comes out.