Will’s Blog

After months of delay, I’m proud to report that call scheduling has finally been implemented on PhoneMyPhone.com. You are now able to go onto the site and schedule a call at any time during the non-blacklisted hours. This opens up a whole new set of cool things you can do with the site, such as:

• Your own personal alarm clock on the road
• Escaping sucky dates early
• Reminding yourself for an appointment

If you use our service in some cool and/or innovative way, please tell us! We’d love to hear what people are doing with our site. Heck, even if you’re just using it to find your phone, email us anyway as we’d love to hear from you.

I’d also like to thanks to all who didn’t give up on us over the last few months. Hopefully we’ll be able to make more frequent updates to the site and bring you even more features (suggestions always welcome)

We’ve made more updates to PhoneMyPhone.com to better serve our customers and prevent abuse.  New features in the last two days:

• You now get an estimate about how long you have to wait before receiving your first call
• You can now enter the phone number in a variety of different formats
• The call button is physically disabled during the “do not call” hours
• Various site design improvements

Coming tomorrow

• Opt out by pressing 1 when you pick up - we still need 1 more day to polish the feature!

I’d also  like to thank everyone for their continuing support and suggestions.  The site’s popularity has already trounced our most optimistic expectations, and simply provides us with more motivation to add even better features.  For those who like to help us out with call costs (these calls do cost us money), please use the donation links on the homepage, and whatever you do, keep those suggestions coming!

After some statistical analysis of the PhoneMyPhone.com call logs, we have realized that before the “no calling at night” rule was implemented, we had made quite a few calls during normal sleeping hours.  I sincerely apologize to the people called at that hour for any inconvenience we may have caused. You can be sure that it will never happen again.

The behavior of redials was also tweaked so that the calls stop when the callee picks up the phone, instead of when the callee picks up the phone and hangs up within 5 seconds.  This implementation still accommodates the “I lost my phone” scenario, but helps prevent someone from getting spammed repeatedly.

Next up:  opt-out forever option.  Press a button, and we’ll never call you again.

Since PhoneMyPhone.com went online about two weeks ago, many of the negative reviews have focused on how easily the service is abused. Many feared that people would get random calls in the middle of the night, or just have their phone ring nonstop for hours at a time (FYI, the calls can be stopped by simply picking up and hanging up within 5 seconds). I’m proud to say that we’re implementing features to make it harder to abuse the service, with features such as:

• Not allowing people to call in the middle of the night (10PM - 6AM PST, 1AM - 9AM EST)
• Limiting calls to a single number in a 24 hour period

Other features that are coming to help curb abuse include:

• Callee presses 1 when he/she gets called, and we’ll never call that number again
• Not calling numbers on the national Do Not Call list

I want to stress that PhoneMyPhone.com was designed to be a tool to CALL YOUR OWN PHONE. We did not implement phone number verification because having that requirement makes it useless when you actually lose your own phone. Please help us by not abusing the service. Thanks!

Recently David Parkinson and I have been developing a site called PhoneMyPhone.com. It was designed to help you find your lost cell phone as you enter your number and it calls you repeatedly.

Stay tuned for new features, ideas, and plans!

I finally caved and started a blog to share my various musings and projects.  All comments welcome!