Update below this article: We have two hot pieces of Facebook news for you here, one is the Facebook Skype announcement, and the other is about the Facebook Chit Chat Blackberry app.

Facebook and Skype have now joined hands and offering users the ability to instant message your friends, you will be able to like and comment using a Facebook status directly from Skype as well. Thanks to the two combined users will be able to video chat with friends within Facebook itself.

There are around 750-million active users on Facebook, so to offer them voice and video calling is a fantastic move, Facebook embedding the Skype calling experience deeply into their site, allowing Facebook users to enjoy the many benefits of video calling.

All users need to do within Facebook is make sure their status in set to online mode and it is ready to use, you can make a video call from the chat box or you can simply click on a friends profile, if they are online a call button will show up at the top of their profile. You can leave a voice message if they are not online, and when your friend comes online they will get an inbox message.

For more information about Facebook Skype, please visit Skype’s Facebook page, or visit the official blog here.

The next bit of news is Chit Chat for Facebook; this is one of the most widely used Facebook Instant Messaging (IM) applications available today. It is renowned for its functionality, reliability, and committed technical development. Until now, Blackberry users have had to cope with inefficient basic Facebook apps or use the unreliable Facebook site itself to IM in real-time with contacts. But this is about to change.

A new mobile version of Chit Chat for Facebook has been developed and this will soon be available for Blackberry smart phones. The app is owned and operated by a UK-based private company, Athena IT Ltd.

So has the transition from Windows- based app to mobile app gone smoothly? Has Chit Chat had to lose some of its many features to integrate with Blackberry technology?

To start a conversation with any of your online contacts, simply highlight the name and select. There is a multitude of customizable options available for the conversation screen. These include: Enabling Emotions on/off, Time stamping messages, Background wallpaper/colour selection, Text Size, Message scheme, Colour of messages being received/sent, Colour of title being received/sent, LED colour alert and Vibrate/audio alert.

Chit Chat for Facebook is available through Mobihand for a limited time launch price of $1.99.

System requirements: Blackberry OS – 4.2 to 6.00

Supported Blackberry models: 9780, 9700, 9650, 9520, 9550, 9530, 9500, 9000, 8530, 8520, 8900, 8800, 8820, 8330, 8320, 8330, 8320, 8220, 8100, 8110, 8120, 8130

UPDATE: We received an email about a new update, please read below –

We have a new update, just yesterday we released a significant update to the Chit Chat application bringing us up to v1.5 – this new version features a completely new interface design, enhance connectivity and dynamic chat connection technology.

To anticipate your question – why bother promoting “Chit Chat” as Facebook has released their own Windows messenger?

Our Messenger application offers benefits that the official Facebook product doesn’t provide – for example the status update aggregation, proxy compatibility, short cut keys.

Competition enhances innovation – many cool things that we’ve introduced in the past have found their way into Facebook’s official client. By promoting us, you actually will help in the development of the whole area of Facebook chatting.