From today users of Twitter will be able to make voice calls directly to one another through a third party offering from Jajah. Jajah is a large Internet communications provider that boasts a massive number of users. The new service known as Jajah@call will allow people to make free two-way voice calls with other users by typing @call @username and provide a means of sending “short messages with a voice”.
At this present time the service has been released in beta and so calls are limited to two minutes and are available to a select number of users. Users must also –inevitably- be a Jajah member. Jajah state that the voice calls will be like ‘short messages with a voice’
Jajah state ways of letting people call you including sending a tweet saying “call me free – reply with @call” or add JAJAH@call to your account info to let people know you are part o the beta.
It appears this is another step in expanding the realms of social networking as Facebook have also taken steps to have such a service attached using third party service Vivox. Whether this will take off remains to be seen as one of the appeals of interacting online is the ability to do it in a face-less way (so to speak). Also with other free call services such as Skype any people who seriously want to interact with people through voice will surely use a service such as this. However there is certainly no harm in increasing the flexibility of how we interact online and who knows it could become a big success…