Jajah Brings Voice Calls To Twitter

jajah@call-twitter-voip

Starting today, Jajah is rolling out a brand spankin’ new service – Jajah@call, a Twitter user-to-user phone call solution. That’s right, ladies and gents. Jajah, the self-proclaimed “world’s most innovative IP communications company,” is bringing this new feature to the wildly popular microblogging service.

This is not too much of a surprise, really, in light of Facebook’s recent voice feature announcement – these are all communication tools, after all, and what is the pinnacle of communication if not voice? It will provide Jajah with increased exposure, while giving always connected Tweeters a new “built-in” VoIP tool. See kids, healthy competition is a good thing!

According to the press release:

How does it work?

To make a call simply send a Twitter message (tweet) with “@call @username” where the ‘username’ is the Twitter name of the person you wish to call. If that person follows you on Twitter, a free two-minute call — the verbal equivalent of a tweet — will be initiated. Both Twitter users need to be JAJAH users as well.

JAJAH@call works no matter how you use Twitter, whether it’s on a computer or mobile phone, at Twitter directly or using a Twitter-client such as Seesmic (web and desktop), TwitterBerry (BlackBerry), Tweetie and Twitterfon (iPhone), and Twidroid (Android).

[Editor’s Note: Ha! A 2 minute voice call is the verbal equivalent of a tweet? The verbal equivalent of one of my tweets is 20 seconds of Sims-esque babbling with the occasional semi-coherent rant about whatever coffee shop I’m at. -Greg]

I’m not sure how necessary or useful this new feature is, but then again I’m not much of a twhore. The good news is that users are not required to reveal their phone number (i.e. it can be kept private) as they just need to know the other person’s Twitter handle and, like any phone service, you can simply choose to ignore a call. It’s also really nice that the service works via users’ mobile devices, and is not limited to more traditional computing devices.

On the downside, not only does @call require both participants to have Twitter accounts (duh), it will only work if each person also has an existing Jajah account (meh). That really makes the whole thing a lot less desirable; yet another account/login to remember.

In any case, has anyone had a chance to try this out yet? Let us know! Talk to you #later.