Show HN: Call emails, not phones | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Call emails, not phones

dialzoo.me

71 pointsbertelet49 comments

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This was super-confusing, at least to me.

It uses the noun "email", which to me means "an email message", as if it meant "an email address".

I found it very annoying and confusing. Perhaps I'm just old, though.

I've definitely heard "give me your email" when asking for someone's email address. It's not uncommon at all.

That always sounds odd to me, like when someone asks "do you have a Facebook?"

This site is vulnerable to Heartbleed: https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/#dialzoo.me

weeks of testing every page he has come across has finally paid off :P

Not anymore : http://safeweb.norton.com/heartbleed?url=dialzoo.me

For me this is a magical combination of two unpopular modes of communication. There's a reason texting/chat is so popular, people don't like email and they don't like phone calls.

Make it paid, and you might have a fighting chance with executives and salespeople. Executives get cold-called AND cold-emailed by terrible salespeople all the time. Know why? Both media are essentially free.

Paying would create a much-needed quality barrier in these irreplaceable but miserable media.

Free isn't always better...how are you planning to make money anyway?

Interesting, thanks.

The registered email address getting the redirection to it's own phone pays for that service by the minute... at a rate comparable to SkypeOut. This is TollFree at really great rate.

Oh, did I mention, once you have an account, you can also dial out to normal phone number using simple URLs again... and pay for that. But this is really an add-on.

Where is the part that says this service is not going to use the obtained email addresses for spamming?

That's not a guarantee they can make, since they're suggesting you share the link that contains your email address in order for people to call you.

To be honest, I'm more comfortable giving out my phone number than my primary contact email address. On the other hand, it's much easier to set up a throwaway email than a throwaway phone number.

Right, Dialzoo does not share email addresses publicly.

But it's to the users of the service to share their dialzoo url including their email. Like http://dialzoo/your@email.com

Our assumption is that people would use email that are consider public info already, and share that.

Perhaps this is more relevant for public profiles such as - business website - public social profiles like linkedin. - facebook - google +

Is the point of the service to allow anyone to send voicemail to any email address? Or is it for people who own the email address to allow anyone to voicemail them?

Because in the latter case (which is what I think the service is), you could make the users register their email address (using a verification email to ensure they do not register someone else email without their consent) in your service and then have a map from a random hash to the email, allowing you to provide urls looking like dialzoo.com/nzef1824Ldaw68873 rather than forcing user to publish their email in clear. Or even require a username and use that for the URL.

Couldn't you do a hash of the email?

http://dialzoo.com/67135a14d3ac4f1369633dd006d6efec

The search space of email is small enough that hashing is not a good solution.

http://www.developer.it/post/gravatars-why-publishing-your-e... http://archive.hack.lu/2013/dbongard_hacklu_2013.pdf

They can add a random seed to the hash to increase the search space. In fact it doesn't need to be a hash - they could just store a random string.

What is being used in your app to check browser versions?

I'm using Firefox Nightly (34.0a1) and it says that my browser doesn't support WebRTC, when it most definitely does.

We check the browser agent not to be IE or Safari. Strange, will try to figure this out.

Dialzoo allows you to hide your phone number and get called for Free.

It also allows to send voicemails to any email address in a click.

Let me know what you think ?

SebP

i don't think it's going to work. google had gvoice for years and marketed it with free phone calls and voicemails, and it didn't take off. i had a similar project 5~6 years ago, which fell apart. my conclusion is that free call is not attractive at all to general public. if you are competing again telcomms (excluding MIM apps), you need a product that is 10x better, and "free" is not a magic word. or, find your niche! (e.g. crowdfunding project funders, consider my disapproved kickstarter project: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1015114671/1150193072?t...)

good luck!

> my conclusion is that free call is not attractive at all to general public

Well Google has the free calling built into Gmail and Hangouts now so I wouldn't be so sure about that.

let me rephrase my words: free call is not attractive at all to general public as a standalone product. it's a nice-to-have feature, not a deal maker.

I get audio files of messages people leave me on MagicJack. I think this is something similar.

I communicate with someone consistently who does not like to type. So, you may have a good use case.

Your website has 90s look. It gives a look of a shaddy service. Doesn't look serious or even professional.

That is what I think. You asked for it.

Hehe, I was looking for that :-)

Is it the pictures, or all the rest ?

Look, if your service is useful enough, it will get traction even if you have no website to boot. That has been the reality of supply and demand since ages.

I like the pictures. These are 1990s web pages: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular...

Dialzoo got 500 users registered just in the last 24h, linking their emails to a phone number. The buzz seems to be taking up :-)

Now at 1800 users !

I think this is a neat idea. It brings up some questions about telemarketing and spam. I am not familiar with telemarketing laws but I'm a little more familiar with the spam laws. Now that the message is going through an email, I wonder if someone could get into trouble for breaking a spam law where a phone call would have been fully legal.

A bug: I clicked "SEND VOICEMAIL" multiple times and it sent a bunch of emails to my test address.

Thanks, it's in our bug list now.

Great Idea, I like it. Just afraid I might start getting 'telemarketing' emails ... aw well ;-)

Noticed you had that invest link down there are you looking for huge VCs or have do you have the legal and technical ability to handle investments from the public?

Would rather go the VC route atm, but open. We are yet to prove our business model based on our beta launch.

It's a bit annoying that your WebRTC-check also triggers on the "what" page, even though it seems to render just fine (and then redirects away).

Fixed. You are right, no reason not to show it.

Doesn't work for me. I get an email with no actual link to the audio message (neither in the plain text part, nor in the HTML (yuck) part).

Can I register and still get callers to leave voice mail?

How about using an alias instead of my email in the url?

Allowing voicemails when registered: #1 requested feature. allow us another day or 2 :-)

About the alias, we are considering it as as great idea also. But we want to keep it simple for now.

We have now added the possibility to choose between Voicemail and call, when the email is linked to a phone number.

Check it out !

Same as my idea: http://ringmail.com

looks similar with SpellDial <http://www.spelldial.com/>

Does this work internationally or is it US only?

International. You can check our rates in all countries in the world: https://dialzoo.me/rates

No iOS support? Why not?

WebRTC is not supported on iOS. We will develop an iOS app shortly to fix that. Currently a web based tool only, to test interest.

SebP

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