Tinychat, creator of a video chat app for Facebook with 1.6 million monthly active users, is going Apple hunting.

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Facebook users who hate the new sidebar chat can relax: Help is on the way, thanks to Tal Ater, founder of Green Any Site.

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An alternative to the Google Hangouts feature on Google Plus was introduced in the form of Social Hangouts on Facebook, which enables video chatting with up to 20 friends without leaving the social network’s platform.

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Facebook cited a non-URL-related policy violation for its removal of the video calling app from Samuday Web Technologies in April.

Samuday founder and Chief Executive Officer Nimit Kumar wrote a long blog post last week claiming that his company’s app was removed so that the social network could claim its URL on the social network, facebook.com/videocalling, for the video calling feature Facebook announced earlier this month, as part of its collaboration with Internet phone provider Skype.

A Facebook spokesperson told ZDNet:

The app was disabled by an automated system for a policy violation that was not related to the URL of the app. The developer’s appeal was manually reviewed; the violation was confirmed, and the appeal was denied. Two months after the initial disabling of the app, Facebook acquired the URL.

Kumar said earlier this week that Samuday’s Video Calling app used its uniRow real-time communication and collaboration platform to provide browser-based video chat for up to four people, including non-Facebook contacts, and after three months, it totaled 22,000 users, 8,500 active users, and 4,500 likes, adding in his blog post:

If Facebook wanted to use the URL, we wouldn’t have had a problem if it would have shared the intent. Disabling an application on false pretext is loss of reputation for an organization. How does Facebook plan to mend that? It probably needs to mend its own reputation first!

Readers, what do you think about this?

At last week’s video chat announcement, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg spoke confidently about the future of Facebook, stating that it was inevitable that the company would reach one billion users. He said it was time that people turned their attention to the integration of social media into new industries and verticals. What he was effectively articulating is the company’s new paradigm under which it is operating, a lens which we can use to further understand i’s ongoing battle with Google.
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Facebook’s integration of Skype is providing an introduction to video calling to many people who simply did not know that free video calling has already been available on the social network.
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Facebook retains its $87.5 billion valuation, based on the outcome of yesterday’s auction of 150,000 shares at $35 apiece on SharesPost.
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Now that Facebook has announced Skype-powered video chat, people are psyched. Now you can see the friends you’ve been text-chatting with on the social networking site. Exciting? Scary?
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Facebook has announced the much-anticipated video chat, along with chatting in groups, both made possible through integration with Skype. Beta versions of these products are available on the site already, so if you’ve had a chance to try them out, we’d love to see your opinions in the comments section.
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Project Spartan is still alive and well at Facebook, but this morning’s press conference most likely has nothing to do with the HTML5-based mobile application platform.

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