America Online is planning to launch by month's end AIM Phoneline, a free service that will let AOL Instant Messenger users receive incoming calls from any phone, a company representative said Thursday.
Voice over instant messaging is built into AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger, but AIM Phoneline would be the first to offer a free phone number. Those services compete with the popular Net phone company Skype, which was acquired by eBay last year.
People can also pay $14.95 a month to upgrade to AIM Phoneline Unlimited, which will let them make calls to any phone number in the U.S. and 30 other countries, the representative said.
AOL, a division of Time Warner, also plans to launch later this month a blogging service called AIM Pages that will alert people when contacts in their buddy list update their AIM Pages blogs, the representative said.