Did you know Google Voice will give you your very own custom phone number, for free?
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! A friend of mine used to have a disposable cell phone account that he posted on his site where he asked people to call and leave funny/drunk/random messages and then he'd upload them to his site. It sure would have been a lot easier had this service been around back then!
Which leads me to this! I created a phone number (864-761-0065) 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 HIF to share with everybody else! In fact, leave your 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!
