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Just days after popular social networking site Facebook (News - Alert) announced that it will be launching a new “voice chat” feature, using Vivox’s VoIP technology, enabling users to make free phone calls to other users, social networking site Twitter announced today that will be introducing a similar calling feature using JaJah’s VoIP technology.

According to published reports, the new Twitter calling service, @call, which is currently in beta, will allow Twitter users to make free, two-minute VoIP calls to other users.

The service will work regardless if a user is using Twitter directly or if they are logged on using a third-party client like Seesmic (News - Alert). In addition users will be able to make calls when using Twitter clients like Tweetie and TwitterBerry on their smartphones.

To place a call, a user must be a Twitter user and a Jajah user (both services are free). In addition, the person you want to call must be following you on Twitter, and you both have to sign up for the @call beta. All a user has to do to start-up a two-way chat is simply “tweet” the person they want to call with "@call @username."

Initially, the service will connect only U.S. numbers. In addition Jajah has promised that all caller ID information will be masked from other users.

Just as with the new Facebook “voice chat” feature, it is largely unknown how many users will make use of this new service. For one thing, a two-minute phone call is not very long – and users could become annoyed if they are getting “cut off” in the middle of calls.

There is also a question as to how good the voice quality will be, as the voice data will be delivered across the public Internet on a “best efforts” basis, and many carriers -- both wireless and fixed line -- are engaging in the practice of de-prioritizing VoIP traffic, other than their own, in an effort to spare precious bandwidth on their networks.

There’s also the issue of non-mobile users having to don headsets or use VoIP speakerphones in order to carry on conversations conveniently while they are sitting at their computers – considering that the “chat” functionality of these social networking sites is so easy to use, and so engrained with users, it’s possible that many of them might actually feel encumbered by having to switch between two separate modes of communication.

What’s more there is the issue of network capacity: Should the new service prove to be wildly popular, and millions of users jump on and start using the service at once, it could result in network congestion issues, as all voice traffic, regardless of compression techniques, is known to be bandwidth intensive. Although Twitter does not release the number of registered users, it is estimated that it has tens of millions of active users.