Just the other day an interesting keyword showed up on my hittail account, “Nimbuzz”. Soon after a review showed up on MobileCrunch. I’m not sure why searches for Nimbuzz were showing up with my site, but either way I decided to take a look to find out what all the buzz about Nimbuzz was.

Nimbuzz provides three primary services:

• Nimbuzz Mobile
• Nimbuzz for Windows
• Nimbuzz Web

Ultimately, these services allow the user to call their IM buddies on their mobile phone or PC at the cost of a local call. While this service sounds great to those that live in the United States and have to pay more for long distance, the benefit provided for international users is not always that great.

A few months ago, I signed up for Rebtel which provides a similar service. I call up a local number and I am connected to my sister in Israel. Once the call connects, my sister is given a local number that she calls and we are both connected via the Rebtel system. The only problem with this is that my sister apparently has to pay more for local calls on her cell phone than international calls. I’m not sure if other people face the same problem in other countries, but someone needs to come up with a workaround for this.

Either way, I predict that alternative services will enable me to make free or cheaper calls to my sister, such as Skype on your cell phone. Additionally, I’ve tried services such as Futurephone.com and AllFreeCalls.net. With those two services I have been able to call my father in Belgium for free, but have yet been able to contact my sister in Israel. AllFreeCalls.net claims that I can call my sister, but Futurephone.com does not provide service for my sister’s area code. Either way, I’m sure a solution will become available soon with the current boom in VOIP solutions.