Today Skype, Microsoft’s recent acquisition, has announced that users of its PC and Mac clients can now link their Facebook profile to their Skype account to allow users to video their Facebook friends. This builds upon the vide chat feature that became available from within Facebook back in July so now users can chat to friends Skype-to-Skype, Skype-to-Facebook or Facebook-to-Facebook. It doesn’t appear to be possible to chat Facebook-to-Skype.

This new feature comes as part of the new 5.4/5.7 (respectively) beta version of Skype, a version is available for both Mac and Windows computers. Skype has provided a video showing easy it is to call a Facebook friend from within the Skype client.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO5GbYHv7HM]

There are a few other improvements within the beta such as smoother video rendering and group screen sharing for Windows users (Mac users have already had this feature).

The furthering of the collaboration between Skype and Facebook over video chatting will help to strengthen Microsoft’s partnership with Facebook. There’s a lot of speculation about where Microsoft plans to integrate Skype; Xbox, Windows Phone, Windows Live Messenger and Lync all being the most anticipated products to receive the integration.