It ain’t so private anymore
January 31st, 2007 at 12:13 pmA while back, I bookmarked a page called Private Phone and promptly forgot all about it, but today I checked it out a bit more in detail and it’s pretty darn nifty!
It allows anybody to sign up for a brand spankin’ new phone number complete with voicemail that you can access on-line or via telephone. So let’s say somebody asks for your phone number, but you’re not comfortable giving out your home or cell number. Well, just give them your Private Phone number! Then, when they leave a message for you, you’ll be alerted via e-mail or text message telling you that you’ve got a new voicemail. You can then either call your Private Phone number and enter your pin or go to your on-line account and listen to it! It even comes with caller ID, so that if you decide you want to call the person back, their number is right there for you to see.
You can pick virtually any area code you want, which is nice in that you won’t look suspicious when giving out the number since you can pick your own area code. You can also record a custom message, so it sounds like your actual personal voicemail. Plus another cool little feature is that all of your voicemails are automatically recorded and uploaded to your on-line account, where you then can share them with your friends via e-mail or your blog or something! Stan used to have something similar called JerkMail, for those that remember. It sure would have been a lot easier had this service been around back then!
But this all leads me to this! I created a phone number (864-641-3866) just for my websites. I’m posting this on my other sites as well and asking people to call it and leave something funny! Heck, just call it if you’re bored and have nothing else better to do! If I get anything interesting or cool, I’ll post the audio recordings* of them up here on Shyzer to share with everybody else! In fact, leave your Private Phone number in the comments and I might even give ya a buzz 
*None of your private info is said in the audio records, it’s just the voice message you leave. So you can trust that I won’t be posting your actual phone number on here for everybody to see!
Jess
I finally took a look, and even broke down and got one. 864-641-3903
But when I was messing around while setting up my voicemail, I noticed some features… if you get a voicemail from someone and would like to call them back, but don’t want them to know your actual number, they give you the option when listening to your voicemail to call them back (with a ten minute limit) and your voicemail number will show up on their caller ID instead of your phone number. Sweet! Not to mention you can schedule a ‘gotta go’ call, so when you’re at a boring/weird social outing and are looking for a good excuse to run, your phone will ring with an automated message asking you if you want to leave. No more faking phone calls in front of people in order to run out the door! This voicemail service just might save my life.