As telephony service specially Skype is getting more and more popular among social networking citizens, A Silicon Valley start-up is gearing up to embed free, Web-based telephone services on a variety of popular social networking and blogging services, including MySpace, Friendster and Blogger. That’s a great news for us, the bloggers, since I recall on an average i spent more or less 30 minutes everyday on Skype and i am sure a lot of bloggers do the same.

Jaxtr plans to allows users to make inbound calls to bloggers from any phone in the world. Jaxtr, a little over a year old which based in Palo Alto California, said it is beginning a test by private invitation of its new calling service, with plans to make it widely available to Web users sometime early in the 2007. It is very easy to use, all you have to do is register yourself first. Once registered on Jaxtr’s site, a user can embed an interactive phone feature into selected blogs or social network profiles, Initially which will be limited to News Corp.’s MySpace, Tagged, Friendster, Hi5, Xanga and Google’s Blogger. You will be able to click on any Jaxtr link, enter your own phone number, which triggers an instant call to your phone. Answering the phone connects you to the Jaxtr user’s own phone(the user you are calling to). Then you speak phone to phone with the person, no more sticking headphone on your head.

Jaxtr provides local phone numbers that allow callers to eliminate expensive international long distance charges from any of 29 national markets in Europe, the Americas and Asia. Initial countries range from United States to most of Western Europe to Brazil, Chile and Mexico and Japan and Singapore. No special software needs to be downloaded for using it. Only the recipient of Jaxtr calls need to sign up for the service. It’s a Web-based version of the conventional dial-around services that allow callers to bypass international phone charges. When a call recipient is unavailable, you can also leave a voice mail message. Recipients can block unwanted callers or only invite selected callers.

So at the end it isn’t a free of charge calling, in fact you(the caller) will be charged but only low cost local call charge. As they mentioned in their FAQ section—

Yes! With Jaxtr, you get unlimited voice messages and 100 minutes per month of incoming calls from your online network worldwide. But that is only half the story. People who call you on Jaxtr will thank you for it because they get to simply reach you by dialing a number in their country!

[tags] VOIP, Voice over IP, International Call, Jaxtr[/tags]