I just read about a new service on SlashDot, which sounds like it might be pretty useful, although I find the positioning strange - maybe a cultural thing.

The service is called SlyDial and you use it to connect you straight to someone’s voice mail, when you don’t want to speak to them in person. To use the service, you dial 267-SLYDIAL (267-759-3425) and after the prompt, dial the person’s mobile number for whom you want to leave a message. This call then goes straight through to their voice mail, without ringing the phone itself - although one SlashDotee claims that it makes the phone ring once. I can’t try it out as it only works in the US, so any feedback would be cool.

The service is ad-funded, with callers having to listen to an ad before getting connected to the voicemail, with an option to upgrade to a paid-for version at 15 cents a call or $4.95 per month for unlimited use.

As far as the positioning is concerned, I find it a little strange that it’s about “sly”, which in British English implies that it’s sneaky or underhand in some way, unlike say, “cunning”, which has a similar meaning, albeit with slightly more admirable qualities. And many of the use-cases that they suggest do indeed sound “sly”, such as a student phoning home but not wanting to actually talk to their parents, or when someone has blown $5,000 gambling and wants to tell their wife to hold off making a mortgage payment!

To me, this is a little like a credit card company promoting itself by suggesting that it makes it easier for you to buy online porn or carry on drinking yourself stupid when you run out of cash. Yes, these are true and many people do use credit cards for these kinds of purposes. But why sully the image of the service for more mainstream users? Human nature will ensure that every nefarious use for a product and service will be discovered and spread virally anyway. I’m sure that bank note issuers didn’t think about how their product could be used to consume cocaine or hammer manufacturers anticipate that they were making murder weapons for some people.

There are other use-cases they go into and arguably far better and surely more realistic examples of how it might be used - such as not wanting to bother someone with a call, but wanting to make sure they get a message, such as confirming a meeting. Personally, I’d do it by email the day before, but there are certainly some people who prefer voicemails, especially in corporate America.

So, while I can see that for some people this kind of service might be interesting some of the time, I do wonder about the marketing and execution. Or maybe I’m being too straight and serious today. What do you think?

As with all these sorts of service though, the biggest challenge is in promoting itself. Getting the word out in the first place is about 5% of the battle. Getting people to use it again and again is the huge challenge, as they must remember that it exists at all when they have a potential need for it and then remember how to use it - or the phone number in this case. These aspects are really, really hard.

I wish them all the best, of course, despite my slight reservations.