Startle your friends with Jaxtr's new tools

We covered Jaxtr back in December. It's a cool telephony tool that lets you put a "call me" icon on your blog page, social network profile, or your e-mail signature. Today the company added a few new features that are worth checking out.

First, there's the startler tool. Over the phone, you can record a "VoiceBlast" greeting for your Jaxtr widget that plays whenever the widget is loaded on a page. When someone visits your blog or MySpace page, they'll hear you talking to them as soon as the page loads.

That is awful.

Fortunately, the autoplay feature can be disabled, as it is in my widget below. You have to press "play" to get the voice message.

Also new: The capability to send a text message directly from the widget to the user, or to send a "stealth message" that goes straight to voice mail instead of ringing the Jaxtr user's phone.

Jaxtr is at its core a dial-around service that can let you give different phone numbers to all the people who call you, each in your callers' local area code. That's a powerful service that could save people a lot of money. The new widget functions look useful as well, which maks Jaxtr unique, I believe: It offers both cute tools for tarting up Web sites as well as a money-saving telephony application.

See also Snapvine and Ether (review), and for fun, Razz.