Hacker News Reader

I like 30 seconds. Call the service SmallTalk. If you get sufficiently popular, you could advertise on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. "You've chosen to use your 'phone a friend' lifeline. Remember, you only have 30 seconds. We'll have the guys from SmallTalk connect you to your mother."

View on HN

Could also partner with providers on data/sms/'SmallTalk' plans.

I'd love to be able to get a hold of call connection data and see what the average cost-per-minute of a call is. I'm sure there's a lot of calls where it runs 1 min 10 sec. or so, and that 50 seconds is wasted but still charged (as it's per-minute).

It would be interesting to try to get the partner provider to value a 'SmallTalk' call around what the actual profit for a call is (vs. published rates), for a little more transparency (and cost control) to the pay as you go market it would make sense in.

You managed to make that awful idea actually sound pretty good. Well done!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com