I built this very same thing about 4 months ago: http://phoneshuffle.com

I didn't try very hard to promote it so it never passed the tipping point for adoption; too many people called in and had no one to talk to.

Yeah, that's the tricky part. It took a couple revisions in front of users to figure out the right way to do bootstrapping.

Twilio's API allows you to create ad-hoc telephone conferences really easily

Hey HN, just thought I'd share a little toy project I put together over the weekend. It's basically just ChatRoulette over the phone. Pretty sure its only appeal will be novelty, but it was one of the ideas I had when I was toying around with Twilio's API, so voila.

One idea I had for making it more interesting/useful was allowing you to select a "category" or "location" so that you could be randomly paired with people from the same location or people with similar interests. Any thoughts?

1. I launched it this morning, so no, I haven't made any money off of it yet.

2. I worked on it part-time for 2 weeks. I'd say it was about 4-5 full days to put together but a lot of that time was spent learning new technologies/APIs I hadn't used before.

The tech used to build it are on the FAQ page: Tornado Redis Twilio Google URL Shortener ReCAPTCHA Mako Templates jQuery SimpleModal IcoJoy WinningTheme

I've launched http://fonoso.com/ a couple of weeks ago, which takes your idea a step further and records full phone calls and could be used for podcast recordings over the phone, or any other use case where you want to archive and/or share a phone conversation.

I didn't put any time or efforts into polishing or marketing it, so if you (or anyone else) wants to team up, contact me at [email protected]. Instead of twilio or something similar, I use my own SIP trunks to carriers, so for inbound calls, no fees are charged. It's easier to offer something for free with this approach :)

This was just a quick side project, so I didn't research too heavily any alternatives. I've never seen Jott before, but from a cursory glance the differences are:

Jott has a monthly fee whereas Call2Record is pay as you go.

Jott is probably much more expensive unless you record a lot of audio ($4/month and $12/month compared to $1/hour)

Jott limits you to recording only up to 30 seconds of audio at a time whereas Call2Record will allow you to record for an unlimited amount of time.

Jott seems to have a bunch of other extra services and features that are built around and compliment their product.

Thanks! I need to change my account to accept international calls to make sure that you can use it.

I agree it's a pretty niche application that most technical users wouldn't find a use for. Very interesting suggestion about a voice contact form. I agree it might be really useful for interacting with a less technical user base.

I'll probably make the service completely free if it doesn't see any uptake.

hi HN! I put this together to toy around with some new technologies that I hadn't played with before.

It's a service for recording audio directly to 'the cloud' with any mobile phone.

Very nice. Now if you could email transcriptions of the recordings and use voice recognition to identify the call participants you'd be onto a winner :).