GoogleTalk gets a 3rd-party VoIM service

We've written before about VoIM services on Yahoo Messenger, AIM and Skype. Here's one that works with Google: Splinternet is in beta and hopes to go commercial at the end of this month. It works about how you'd expect--add someone to your Google buddy list and use Splinternet to call over GoogleTalk to the PSTN. There's an initial free trial and rates for the outbound service vary depending on the country being called. Calls to the U.S. are 2.9 cents per minute. We don't know yet if this service will also work with other Jabber-based chat clients, such as Apple's iChat.

For more information about Splinternet:
- read this article on TMCNet