Making a Love Connection: Free Voicemail Services

Ever been frustrated at spending big bucks on disposable phone cards and not really being able to give out a number to be called back! Or, been concerned about giving out your home phone number online to someone you have never met? Well, there’s a new way to making connecting overseas or with anyone you meet on a dating Web site even easier: a so-called “social phone number” that connects to a FREE online voicemail box.

You can read all about it online in the New York Times, but here’s a run down courtesy of LoversPlanet.com of everything you need to know.

Basically, by signing up with one (or all) of several sites you can get a phone number (or four or five!) that is about as permanent as a free e-mail account. Just like you can sign up and later forget about an e-mail box, you can sign up for a phone number, for free, for a short time or as long as you want. That’s a long way from a traditional pager or pay-per-use (or month) voice mail service, and from signing up with a traditional phone company, which charges a connection fee and monthly service fees.

There’s a couple major sites: PrivatePhone.com, simplevoicebox.com (which also offers pay by the minute conferencing), j2.com (slightly more expensive conferencing and fax services), and k7.net (similar to the first two but with less bells and whistles).

PrivatePhone.com is one of the biggest services offering free voice mail. You can sign up at their site (no commitments, no credit cards) and receive up to 10 voicemails that you can listen to from your cell phone or from your computer. You can pick from their numbers a local or otherwise area code, which can really enable a greater level of privacy if that’s a concern for you.

One of the cool features of PrivatePhone.com is that you can post a voicemail to a Web site, like a blog or Myspace, which can give you the opportunity to show off your new dating interest to all your friends.

As that New York Times story points out, being too anonymous can be a turn off, but the opportunity to make that initial connection can really break down barriers. More to come on talking on the cheap. Check back in!

Tags: dating

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 11:08 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.