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Period. Vonage is an Internet telephony service. You plug a little box into your cable modem or dsl line and then plug your phone (or entire house phone system) into the box, and all your calls are routed through the Internet. The quality is equivalent to regular phone almost all the time, unless you're using alot of your bandwidth for other purposes, and you get extra features like your voicemails being accessible on the web or being emailed to you, etc. The craziest thing, though, is that it costs $25 per month for unlimited local AND national long distance. That's $15 per month less than I was paying Bell South just for local service ($40 per month).
And, of course, the nerd community has been hacking at it in order to produce some pretty amazing 3rd party applications, most of which you can find here. The 3rd Party Call Control site lets you initiate Vonage calls through the web, with some pretty cool results. Since you can access it from the web, you can use it to schedule wake-up calls, integrate it with other applications, and set up web book marks to automatically call people. When your computer initiates the call, your Vonage phone rings.
You pick up your phone, and it then automatically calls the person you want to call. For a regular call this would be pointless, since you can just pick up the phone and dial, but you can use this to autodial people in your Outlook or Thunderbird contact list or any number you find on the web. There's even a plugin for the Firefox browser, which is my browser of choice.
But wait, there's more! Using a little web knowhow, you can use the PHP code they provide to allow people to basically call you for free. What happens is, they can enter their own numbers into the page you create, like this one I created. This tells your Vonage phone to call their number, your Vonage phone rings, you pick it up, and then it calls them - all without any long distance charges, because it's as if you used your Vonage phone to call them directly! The only caveat to this is that the person has to be there to pick up the phone. You won't get their voicemail or anything if they aren't... basically nothing will happen if they don't pick up their phone.
This service is cool as hell, and I even got my Vonage adapter for free from Best Buy. Don't know if it was a special sale or what, but it was $60-$60 mail in rebate when you activate the service. Go check out Vonage, sign up, and use me as a referral (vonage at dirtygreek dot org is the address you should contact me at if you want the referral). Unfortunately, though, buying it at a retail outlet like Best Buy means you can't use a referral. If you do get one, you'll get a free month (and of course I'll get some perks as well).
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