Thu, 16 Jul 2009

Vanity phone numbers that can be yours

This thing called Google Voice has been around a while. The original idea goes as follows: You sign up and receive a new phone number which is managed by Google. You program it with the numbers of your existing phones, and then whenever anybody calls your new number, it rings your existing phones. The point being that people can call just one number, and you can answer on your work phone, cell phone, or whatever else you have. That was called "Grand Central" and it was its own company until Google bought them.

Since then, Google has added a lot of features, but it was still a mess to use, because they couldn't do anything about the fact that any calls or messages you send from a cell phone still look like they are coming from your original (non-google-voice) phone number. That might be fixed today, with a new thing you can download for Blackberry or Android.

The point of all this is, I finally signed up to try it, and the first thing you have to do is pick your new phone number. So what I did, being extremely motivated to do work today, was filter all the 7 letter words out of the dictionary and look up all of the ones that seemed interesting to see if they were available. (Since you are going to ask, there are about 20,000 of them, and it took about 90 minutes.) So I now present, as a public service, a list of interesting google voice phone numbers that can be yours if you act now:

(The area code and state don't matter, you can pick anything you want.) The one I picked for myself is not in this list. But 848-MATHNET was a strong runner up. 561-AIRHEAD, 507-RAGTIME, 409-BEDEVIL, and 510-VIBRANT are pretty good too. 530-BELOVED is good for somebody that's not me.

Leave a comment if you take one of these...or just tell me, if, like me, you don't want your new phone number on the interwebs.