As a Canadian citizen I often find as new products are rolled out in other countries, I’m left waiting months for them to get to Canada. Any Canadian citizen will tell you that often the Canadian equivalent of popular US-based services leave a lot to be desired (Amazon & Netflix to name a couple). I read an article today that has one company putting Canadians ahead of the rest of the world and the company doing so may surprise you: Facebook.

Facebook is introducing a voice over IP (VoIP) feature for their messenger service which will essentially allow users to call each other over data (via Facebook Messenger) instead of using up their mobile minutes. The feature is currently in a testing phase and they have chosen none other than the great white north (Canada) to do test it in. The feature is supposed to be automatically enabled for Canadian users; however, I’m curious how they are going to determine people’s region. For example, if they choose to base it on your Facebook locations what will happen if users signed up with their hometown being US but now live in Canada, or will they go an easier route and base it on IP address.

I decided to give the feature a shot and while I didn’t get a chance to use it on a long call, my brief experience with it so far has been quite positive. I had decided to call my wife over the iPhone app and I have to admit that the call sounded just as clear, if not clearer, than when using Skype to call iPhone to iPhone. The call connected at a very reasonable speed and the interface was extremely easy to use. The only flaw I could really find was that the background noise cancellation needs some work as I could hear the TV clearer than any other phone-to-phone voice service I’ve used. Considering this feature is in the testing phases I am very impressed with my experience so far.

Admittedly I’ve never been much of a Facebook Messenger user in the past, but as I find more involvement outside of the iOS platform I find myself in search for an alternate messenger that can be used on the majority of platforms I use. Facebook has been making some good changes to their messenger service and this recent feature seems to indicate to me that they are getting very serious about their messenger service. With over 1 billion users on Facebook, if the company can build a multi-platform client that offers the features of iMessage, Skype and BlackBerry Messenger combine, I think they could become the premiere messaging service.