In its efforts to stay relevant in a world of competitive messaging apps, Microsoft continues to beef up Skype with new features it hopes will attract new users to its platform.
That is exactly what the Skype team aims to do with the addition of the latest feature of Skype for Windows and Skype for Mac. In a blog post, the Skype team has announced that users can now share links to their Skype chats with other people without requiring them to create or open a Skype account.
"Today, we're excited to announce something new - a small change that will make a big difference to how people use Skype every day," says Microsoft. "We've started to roll out the ability for users to invite anyone to join a Skype chat by sharing a unique link - send it however you want, in an email, on Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger or Twitter."
The new feature works by letting users generate a unique link for a certain chat by clicking the +New button. This will create the link that can then be shared to other people through any means. On the receiving side, users who are invited to a chat can simply click on the link to go to the Skype for Web interface, enter their name and start chatting away.
The link can also be shared with Android and iOS users, who can join the chat on mobile if they have a Skype account. In the future, the Skype team promises to allow users to chat on mobile even without having an account. For now, however, the feature is only available for Skype for Web and is limited only to users in the U.S. and U.K., although Microsoft says the feature will roll out to other countries in the coming weeks.
While the feature is obviously targeted towards casual users who want to communicate with their family and friends, it is still useful for business users who are looking to participate in less formal conversations with coworkers, partners or clients without requiring them to download the Skype client to their PCs or Macs.
Microsoft, in fact, has been beefing up Skype for enterprise users recently. On Wednesday, we reported that Microsoft killed of Lync 2013 for iOS and replaced it with Skype for Business instead. The new offering provides a number of new features, such as synced conversations and stronger security measures, aimed at business owners.
