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Call Someone – Without Having To Talk To Them
waderoush writes "After a long beta period, Boston-based MobileSphere launched a 'straight-to-voicemail' service yesterday called Slydial. If you call 267-SLY-DIAL and listen to a short ad, you can then be connected to the voicemail inbox of any US mobile phone subscriber, without causing their phone to ring. Sounds kinda useful — but incredibly, MobileSphere is pitching the service as a way to avoid actually communicating with all those difficult, boring people in your life. In reply to suggestions that Slydial erodes and cheapens genuine human interaction, a MobileSphere exec says the company is just combating technology with technology, by helping people take control of whether and when to talk with their friends, family, and coworkers."
Voice mail is worse than talking to those boring people. I hate voice mail.
If I want to communicate with someone without calling them, I'll take text any day.
. In reply to suggestions that Slydial erodes and cheapens genuine human interaction,
You say that as if it's a bad thing :-)
And therefore guaranteed to never receive a response!
I don't think I -ever- check my voicemail unless I've accidentally missed a call I know is important, and almost nobody I know checks theirs on their personal cell either.
Text messaging has replaced leaving voicemail for reminders and invitations, as it's much easier and more convenient.
I think this is a service far past its time. Maybe it would have been useful in the 90s.
Work is different, but this isn't exactly targeted at businesspeople.
I stumbled upon this gem while looking for a quick way to enable/disable forwarding on my blackberry:
http://www.geckobeach.com/cellular/secrets/gsmcodes.php
my cell phone is permanently on mute, i don't have a home phone. text me or email me. its asynchronous communication, far superior. i don't have to immediately interrupt what i'm focused on to deal with something usually trivial
i've had trouble in my jobs because of this, i subtly train employers not to call me. i purposely miss their calls, let their call ring while i'm sitting there, and then i send them an email right after they call: "did you just call me?" i never call them, and always email
people romanticize dealing with someone directly as something that is lost. well people also romanticize the great depression and world war ii era london. people romanticize their teenage years (they are painful for everyone). what people romanticize means shit
i live in times square, and people romanticize how it was before it had been disneyfied and turned into just another mall setting. well i remember pre-giuliani times square: prostitutes, heroin addicts, and stinky adult stores. fuck that. people romanticize all sorts of crap. but its just empty pointless nostaligia, and has no real merit or valid argument on its behalf
saying something is lost with less people talking to each other in person or on the phone is bullshit. its not better. email and text is far superior to the telephone
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think this is good for the times when you want to quickly leave a person a message without wanting to disturb them.
That's exactly what I want. No disturbance, no conversation, just leaving them a quick note. Just like I can do with email. It dumbfounds me that we call it "voice mail" when the behavior is pure 1970s answering machine, and nothing like postal mail or electronic mail.
I don't think I -ever- check my voicemail unless I've accidentally missed a call I know is important, and almost nobody I know checks theirs on their personal cell either.
Seriously? Whenever I see the little voicemail icon lit up, I check it. You really just ignore the messages until they get auto-deleted unless you think there's something especially good in there?
There are times when I just want to send a voicemail home without ringing the phone -- often because it's late and I don't want to wake anyone up. Since I'm already running Asterisk, I just registered a DID with IPKall, which is a free service. When I dial the IPKall number, it goes straight into voicemail. So if, for example, my wife wakes up in the middle of the night and sees the VM light on the phone blinking, she can push the button and find out that I'm stuck at work on an overnight project, or whatever. If, on the other hand, the purpose of my call is important enough to wake someone up at home, I dial the main number and the phones ring.
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Well, yes, but... you have no way to be sure that the receipient's cell phone doesn't ring (the phone company long ago made sure that the caller and callee's rings don't sync up so that the number of rings couldn't be used to encode messages, e.g. one ring for a boy, two for a girl), and there are reasons for that other than not wanting to talk to someone--say you know that the recipient won't want to be disturbed, but will want to get the message as soon as the meeting/surgery/fire drill/etc. is over.
Funny, if someone calls me, and I miss it, and they don't leave a voicemail, I assume it wasn't important and don't call them back.
"I only speak the truth"
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Voicemail.
E-mail.
IM.
Most people I know put email as lower urgency then IM. IM is typically real-time, but not real-time enough to completely halt whatever you were doing. Email and VM is usually "respond when you get a chance"
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Those are those old phones that charge you extra money every time you call someone outside your immediate geographical area, right?
And charge you an extra monthly fee to even have voicemail?
And that you can only use when in your own home?
Yeah, I think I remember my grandfather talking about them.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Do you have a source for the reason you give for the phone companies not syncing the incoming and outgoing rings? I've always wondered about that.
It seems most people don't like checking their voicemail, but I take it a step further. I don't answer the phone unless the person leaves a voicemail (with the exception of family). I figure if the issue isn't important enough to leave a message, it isn't important enough for me to answer the phone.
The best was at my old job where I managed the phone switch. I just set my voicemail queue depth to zero. When people called they'd get my recorded message telling them to send me an email.
I'm sure they call the provider's "check your voicemail remotely" number.
For example, with Sprint, you can dial the area-code, and exchange followed by 6245 (mail), and then proceed to enter a mailbox number to check (with password) or send (without password) a message to.
Other providers have a similar number.
So instead telling people this, these guys are having you listen to an advertisement and dialing the number for you.
Using rings to encode information is a pretty poor way to do it, since you've got no confirmation that the person sending the rings is actually the person you expect to call. The way to do it is to abuse the collect calling mechanism. When I was in middle school, I used a system where I called my parents collect when my soccer practice was over and they simply declined the charges. But since they knew that I had tried to call them, the knew to come pick me up.
The system pretty reliably deals with the situation where you try to send explicit messages when you're asked to record your name (that was the first thing I tried, but it would make me repeat my name until I said a real name and not something like, "I'm ready to be picked up"). But you can still send signals on the sly without them knowing. For instance, in your example (one ring for a boy, two for a girl), you'd just place the collect call using either the name "Bobby Smith" or "Jenny Smith" and the caller would ascertain the gender from the name used...you could even use this mechanism to send the full name you'd chosen for the newborn. With a large collection of pre-arranged fake names, you could pretty reliably send messages from pay phones or over long distance without paying a cent.
Of course the advent of cell phones and VoIP solutions make these tricks somewhat less relevant.
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