Dump your lover directly on voice mail

NEW YORK - The old song had it right: Breaking up is hard
to do. But a free new phone service called Slydial might
make it easier to get through that and other awkward moments — without actually
having to talk to anyone.

Slydial lets you connect directly with another person's
cell phone voice mail, bypassing the
traditional ringing process that often results — sometimes disastrously — with
someone picking up on the other end.

Users call (267) SLY-DIAL from either a cell phone or a landline, and are
prompted to enter another person's cell phone number.

After playing a short advertisement — unless users pay a
subscription fee or 15 cents per call to skip ads — Slydial puts callers
directly into their target's voice mail.

Recipients should then get a voice mail notification, and
sometimes they will see a caller's number show up as a missed call, too.

Gavin Macomber, co-founder of MobileSphere Ltd., the
Boston-based communications company behind Slydial, said there were currently
some technological limits. It can only be used in the U.S. right now, and
generally won't work with prepaid cell phones.

Also, sly dialers must have the caller ID feature
activated on their phones, which Macomber said is meant, in part, to prevent
people from using it to harass people undetected.

Macomber thinks it can be useful not only in the dating
scene, but also in the hectic business world.

"Everybody has gone through the scenario where they've
called somebody and just hoped they got voice mail so they didn't have to have a
conversation," he said.

Nora Rubinoff, 45, who runs an administrative support
company, At Your Service Cincinnati Ltd., has found Slydial helpful both for
business and personal situations. She has left reminder messages for people one
of her clients intends to interview. And when her husband travels to a different
time zone for work, she can leave him a Slydial message without disturbing him
at an odd time of day, she said.

"It's been really handy," she said.

Macomber said the idea for Slydial came up while
MobileSphere developed the voice mail routing component of a service meant to
lower the cost of international roaming on cell phones.

The company rolled out a private test phase of Slydial in
March, and has added about 5,000 users since then. The service opened to the
general public in a "beta" testing phase on Monday.

The ability to call straight into someone's voice mail is
not new. Most major cell phone carriers offer subscribers the option of sending
voice messages to other people, but usually only to customers of the same
wireless company. What's different here is that Slydial makes it possible to do
it with any major wireless carrier's customer.