A Free Local Phone Number!

I’ve been using NetZero’s Privatephone service for several months now, and it is *really* cool.

You get a local phone number (in the U.S., anyway - not sure about other countries), that rings into voice mail. You can pick up your messages either from their website, or by calling your number and entering your PIN.

You could use this number to post in a classified ad if you were selling something and didn’t want to give your home number away. You could use it for dating (especially if you’re already married) - or alternately, as a number to give to creepy people, when you don’t want them to have your real number. You could also use it as a “local” number to give to out-of-town friends. (For instance, you live in Kansas but have friends in Florida - set up a local Florida number for your friends to call you, then check messages on the web.)

Another good use would be if you were in hiding from an abusive spouse, and wanted him or her to think you lived in another state -every month you get ten free minutes of a service they call “Private Call-back”. If you’re listening to your messages from somebody’s phone, you can press a button and return the phone call of a person who left a message - and it will ring their phone with a caller ID that matches your Privatephone number - so it looks like you REALLY have that phone number and area code!

Another goodie they give you is called a “Gotta Go Call“. Basically, it’s a rescue phone call that you set up ahead of time. If you think you will need an excuse to leave a situation at a certain time, you can set up the “rescue” call to call at a certain time - the phone will ring at the appointed time, and a woman’s voice will come on, asking if you can “come over right away”. It’s an instant emergency that can give you an excuse to leave!

You can also set up the service to “embed” your voicemails into a blog page, but I haven’t played with that yet.

The whole service is free, it works, and it’s very cool. You don’t even need a credit card to sign up! Why is it free? NetZero wants to sell you other, upgraded services, so they use this as the freebie hook. It’s a very nice hook.

Give it a try at http://www.privatephone.com/

(This is NOT a paid endorsement or ad or anything, by the way… I’ve been disgusted with NetZero more than once in the past - their “free” internet service sucked eggs, while forcing banner ads in your face. I swore off the NetZero brand for life, several years ago, but I have to admit, they did really good with this phone service.)