VoxOx brings chat, social networking, phone calls together

VoxOx is one of those applications that does so many things that the easiest way to describe it is by listing some of the tools it can replace: AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Jabber, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, whatever email and social networking notifiers you use. In other words, it's like Digsby. But with support for video chat and VoIP calls to telephones. Oh yeah, and VoxOx automatically assigns all new users a phone number which people can dial to reach you on your computer.

VoxOx is currently in beta, with clients available for Windows and OS X. Linux and mobile clients are coming soon. And right now some of the services listed in VoxOx are unavailable. For examle, you can link the client to your Yahoo! Mail account to receive a pop up message every time you get a new email. But when you click the button to do the same thing with Gmail, nothing happens.

One of the most interesting things about VoxOx is the company's business model. You can do text chats with anyone for free. You can make free voice or video calls to anyone using VoxOx. And when you sign up you get 120 minutes of free calls to telephones. You can purchase credit for additional calls, or pay a monthly fee fro unlimited access. But every time you refer a friend to the service you get another 2 hours. And VoxOx will also soon add the ability for users to gain points by watching video ads.

If you're one of the first 500 Download Squad to register using our signup page, you'll get 1200 VoxOx Points which are good for 1200 domestic phone calls minutes of domestic US phone calls. Keep reading to find out how to get your bonus minutes.

I tested VoxOx to make a few phone calls and to chat with a few friends. The voice quality was pretty good, although I feel like there may have been a tiny bit more lag than I typically experience in Skype calls. The chat features work pretty much as you'd expect - except that the chat window is much larger than it needs to be. I also found that VoxOx has an unusal solution for sending files to friends using different chat platforms like AIM, or MSN Messenger. Instead of actually transfering a file directly from your computer to your friends', VoxOx uploads the file to its servers and creates a temporary download link which can be shared via Chat, SMS, or email.

VoxOx does suffer from excessive RAM usage, which shouldn't be surprising considering how much this application does. I found that it used between 125MB and 200MB of memory. If you plan to take full advantage of all of the program's features that might seem reasonable. But if you just need a chat application you might be better off sticking with Trillian, Pidgin, Digsby, or Adium.

To get 1200 free Vox Points, visit the Download Squad signup page.