Facebook Voice Chat App Now Live in Beta

A few weeks ago, we learned that Facebook was going to get voice chat.
The new feature wasn’t going to be powered by Facebook itself though, but rather through Vivox, a well-known voice chat provider for video games and the Second Life virtual world.
Today, Vivox Voice Facebook app has launched in beta. And because we love to play around with things here at Mashable, Adam Ostrow and I took it for a test drive.



The app doesn’t work seamlessly, but it isn’t terribly difficult to set up either. After installing the Vivox Voice Facebook app, you must install a browser plug-in to integrate voice chat. Once you’ve done that, voice chat is activated. You can then invite friends that have the app to you voice chat. Inviting is done via a bit.ly link that Vivox sends via FbChat.

The bottom line is this: Vivox’s solution works, but it isn’t the heralded Facebook video chat that would be integrated directly in Facebook Chat. Until Facebook launches their own solution though, it’s a good alternative

Women Rule the Social Web

…at least according to an infographic by Information is Beautiful. The stats, compiled by Brian Solis from Google Ad Planner data, show that equal numbers of men and women use sites like LinkedIn, DeviantArt and YouTube.
When it comes to sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace and Bebo, however, women outnumber men. In fact, there’s only one major holdout for men on the social web: social news site Digg, where 64% of users are male.
That the Digg population is largely male should come as no surprise, but what about the other stats? Are women just more social in general, or is there some other explanation? Let us know in the comments.