Lots of companies now want your video chats – even Facebook

Facebook’s new video chat service called Messenger Rooms on a mobile phone. The New Facebook service uses virtual rooms similar to those that exist for text chat within Messenger. These let you open the door so your friends can swing by unannounced, or schedule a dinner party for 8pm on a Friday. — Facebook via AP

OAKLAND, California: Amid the coronavirus pandemic, this has become an era of Zoom birthdays, virtual happy hours, FaceTime story times and Google yoga classes. Our friends, coworkers, teachers – and doctors, if we're lucky – now largely exist as faces in rectangles on our 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 issues with the video-calling service. There were already several smaller contenders for the throne, and now there's a big one as well: Facebook.