PrivatePhone

» see privatephone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The whole product was an american area code. You picked a state, any of them except Alaska and Hawaii, and PrivatePhone handed you a working number in it for nothing. That is a service which cannot cross a border, and in 2006 nobody in turkey was being asked for a phone number by an online retailer anyway. What we handed out instead was an msn address, which did the same job of standing between you and a stranger.

NetZero opened it on 1 june 2006. NetZero was the free dial-up brand, by then part of United Online and long past the years when free dial-up was a business, and PrivatePhone was one of the things it tried next. Every call to your number went straight to voicemail. There was no ringing and no way to answer, and the messages arrived in a web inbox you checked from a browser like email.

The limits told you what it cost them. Messages had to be two minutes or shorter and your greeting forty five seconds. The inbox started at ten messages and later moved to ten thousand. There was a callback feature capped at ten minutes a call and ten calls a month, and it broke for a whole season in 2007, which meant subscribers spent the spring and summer making unlimited free calls until somebody noticed and fixed it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pitch ~

NetZero shot three promotional cartoons in late 2006 and put them on the site, each one a small scenario ending with a professor explaining that the service was free with no contract and no credit card. Jenny had put her cell number on her resume and was taking calls from prospective employers in front of her current boss. Bob shopped online, gave the house line to a retailer once and paid for it at dinner time for years. The third video was the bar one, where Jane gives Dick her number and then hears from Dick again and again and again. In early 2007 the videos went onto CDs that sat in Best Buy.

The strangest feature was the Gotta Go Call. You scheduled a call to your own phone at a chosen time, and at that time 1-800-991-9984 rang you with a recorded voice asking if you wanted to come over, so you had a reason to leave wherever you were. It stopped working when the callback system went down and would then ring silently, which is a worse outcome than not calling at all.

~ what really happened ~

NetZero Voice, the VoIP product PrivatePhone sat next to, was announced dead on 31 october 2007 and switched off on 15 december, with its customers pointed at Packet8 for $19.95 a month. The voicemail service was announced to close on 31 december with it, then given a reprieve into the new year, and a message went to every user on 16 january 2008 confirming 19 february as the date. Numbers could be moved to Packet8 for a fee, and NetZero left a window open afterward for people who still wanted to hold on to theirs. Somebody recorded what the line said at the end and uploaded it, so the closing message is sitting on Wikipedia as an audio file, which is more of a funeral than most disconnected numbers get.

What the service was actually for is now a paid feature on every phone in the world. A second number you hand to people you do not trust yet, with the calls going somewhere you read rather than answer, is the entire premise of Google Voice and of every burner-number app on a phone store today. PrivatePhone gave it away in 2006 and could not find a way to be paid for it, which was also true of the free dial-up business it came out of.

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