Wednesday, April 5, 2006
What Is The Best Free Service?
Posted by Jon Westfall in "THOUGHT" @ 06:00 AM
Many moons ago I decided to try almost every free service I could get my greedy little geek hands on. It is for this reason that my eWallet overflows with Usernames & Passwords to services that do everything from deliver news emails to give me remote access to my machines. I'm sure I'm not alone in this - and that many of you have your favorite free service that you religiously use. The goal of this thread is to share these services and give others some great time-wasting activities for today (After all, ya gotta try them all ;) )
So what is YOUR favorite free service? What makes it so great? How often do you use it? As for mine.... I suppose I'll tell you if you read on
CallWave is an interesting company in their offerings. One of the best services they have is known as CallWave For Your Cell Phone (A subset of CallWave Mobile). This free service (With an optional $3.99/mo upgrade that I haven't had need for yet) was posted on our frontpage a number of months back, and I enthusiastically signed up that day. If you're not familiar with it, it is a voicemail service that replaces the voicemail your wireless provider gives you. It adds a number of features, including
* Voicemails & Missed Call Notices (With Caller ID) sent to your email.
* Option to transfer call to landline
* Option to listen to your callers as they are leaving a voicemail and optionally interrupt and answer the call. This feature alone has freaked out many a friend whose call I just missed.
For free, they give your callers the option to leave up to a 1 minute message (In practice, anyone who leaves longer than a 1 minute voicemail deserves to be hung up on in most cases!), and you can interrupt and talk to the person for up to 20 minutes on Callwave's dime (Certainly enough time to tell them to call you back, or to call them back!). For the $3.99 upgrade, your callers can leave 3 minute messages and you can talk to them for an unlimited time. As I said, I haven't had need for the upgrade yet, but it's nice to know it's there. CallWave also allows you to assign nicknames to people's phone numbers, so my alerts (Which can be configured to go to Email or SMS or both) can say "Mom called and did not leave a message" vs "44x-3xx-9xxx called and did not leave a message". Quite a nice touch.
Now that I've shared with you, it's only fair you share with me - what free service do you love. There are others in my list of favorites, see if you can guess the others or (better yet) give me one that I haven't used yet!
So what is YOUR favorite free service? What makes it so great? How often do you use it? As for mine.... I suppose I'll tell you if you read on
CallWave is an interesting company in their offerings. One of the best services they have is known as CallWave For Your Cell Phone (A subset of CallWave Mobile). This free service (With an optional $3.99/mo upgrade that I haven't had need for yet) was posted on our frontpage a number of months back, and I enthusiastically signed up that day. If you're not familiar with it, it is a voicemail service that replaces the voicemail your wireless provider gives you. It adds a number of features, including
* Voicemails & Missed Call Notices (With Caller ID) sent to your email.
* Option to transfer call to landline
* Option to listen to your callers as they are leaving a voicemail and optionally interrupt and answer the call. This feature alone has freaked out many a friend whose call I just missed.
For free, they give your callers the option to leave up to a 1 minute message (In practice, anyone who leaves longer than a 1 minute voicemail deserves to be hung up on in most cases!), and you can interrupt and talk to the person for up to 20 minutes on Callwave's dime (Certainly enough time to tell them to call you back, or to call them back!). For the $3.99 upgrade, your callers can leave 3 minute messages and you can talk to them for an unlimited time. As I said, I haven't had need for the upgrade yet, but it's nice to know it's there. CallWave also allows you to assign nicknames to people's phone numbers, so my alerts (Which can be configured to go to Email or SMS or both) can say "Mom called and did not leave a message" vs "44x-3xx-9xxx called and did not leave a message". Quite a nice touch.
Now that I've shared with you, it's only fair you share with me - what free service do you love. There are others in my list of favorites, see if you can guess the others or (better yet) give me one that I haven't used yet!
