Watch you back Skype/Microsoft, Google is gunning for you. Alongside their social initiatives, Google is now implementing its open-source audio and video chat software into the Chrome browser, enabling users to chat in real-time without having to load up a secondary client like Skype.

Google has started to build its open-source WebRTC software into Chrome. WebRTC was introduced in May as a new open tech that allows developers to create quick HTML and Javascript APIs for building voice and video chat applications on the web. With WebRTC built into Chrome, users will be able to start video chats over Google Talk without the need for installing Google’s plug-in first. Oh and they’ve introduced this as royalty-free and are promising to work with other browsers developers(probably Mozilla and Opera initially, but then IE and Safari at some point too) to flesh out the project. This means that anyone building a site can make use of the new tech, and in theory, construct their own personal Skype battering ram. I bet someone is at MS is questioning if they should have spent that massive amount of money for Skype (then again, maybe they knew this was coming and they HAD to in order to compete?!).

The WebRTC (a la Google Talk via the browser) will certainly help the ChromeOS initiative, it’s one more piece of the “web as the OS” strategy coming into place. I also have to imagine that this will play VERY well in with Google’s new social initiative: Google+.