Lycos announced Lycos Phone on Monday, adding free multimedia-enhanced VOIP communications as a key part of its portal infrastructure.

The Lycos Phone service will allow users free PC-to-PC communications to any other Lycos Phone user, consistent with other PC-to-PC applications, like eBay's Skype. However, Lycos has gone a step further and will also provide users with a free U.S. phone number, so that callers can dial in and talk to a Lycos customer on his desktop or laptop computer.