Phone Service Aims to Keep Online Encounters in Line

Karlie Kitmiss was tempted to give her online pal her phone number.

The 24-year-old Irvine delivery person had met this guy, “John,” in an America Online chat room. For hours, they had talked about surfing and skating and when the Sex Pistols stopped being cool.

Their one-night gabfest turned into a regular thing. He asked for her phone number. She wanted to give it, but still had some concerns.

“He could have been crazy,” Kitmiss said. “I had never met him in person, you know.”

So she signed up for directReach, an online service that lets digital friends talk through a pay-per-minute anonymous phone service.

Internet chat has reached the next level of intimacy, thanks to that old communication standby--the telephone. Private Communications Corp., the San Francisco company that developed and now markets the service, realized that many people want to have phone conversations with the people they meet in chat rooms, but are reluctant to give out their home phone numbers.

Subscribers receive a free, private telephone extension number. When an online friend wants to chat, he calls directReach’s toll-free number and punches in his friend’s extension. The call is then forwarded--anonymously--to the subscriber’s home number.

While registration is free to the user, the caller catches the cost: a $2.50 connection fee and 49 cents per minute.

“You’d have to be brain dead to give out your phone number to someone you don’t know,” said company president Ann Meceda. “It’s a modern safety issue.”

While the firm declines to say how many subscribers it has, Meceda acknowledges that the service is geared for--and embraced by--mostly women.

The service is being promoted on AOL and Love@AOL, as well as on dating Web sites Match.Com and Singles Online.

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P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com.