Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.

When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems – which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program.

But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally – let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.

How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”

Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message – “Just left you a VM, it’s important” – just so you know it’s there.

There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks.

The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert voicemail into text and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag Yap and Jott, for example).

More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).

For now most people don’t have voicemail transcription services. So think before you voicemail, more and more people just find it annoying.

Too often in the rush of trying to launch something new, entrepreneurs pay too little attention to coming up with a good name for their product or company. It might start off as a part-time project and they just want to get it up and running. So they pick the first name that comes to mind—often something awful—and then they are stuck with it.

That is what happened to SimulScribe, a handy voice-to-text service that turns voicemails into e-mail. When James Siminoff and Mark Dillon started SimulScribe in 2003, both had other full-time businesses. It was a side project that they codenamed “Simultaneous Voicemail Transcription,” which they shortened to SimulScribe. But now five years later, it is a full-time gig that’s growing but the name is holding back the startup. Siminoff admits:

The name SimulScribe totally sucks for our business. People have a real challenge remembering the name and they cannot spell it, which is a real problem considering that new customers need to type in our web address to sign up. When your company offers a consumer product that relies on viral marketing, a difficult name is a really bad thing. In fact, I’m constantly amazed at how well we have been able to do with such a shitty name.

Name recognition is especially important when you are up against better-funded competitors like SpinVox (which could also use a better name, but has raised $200 million to SimulScribe’s $5.7 million). Siminoff has been looking for a new name for two years, one with a domain that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. Finally, a few months ago after a red-eye flight from LA to New York, after not returning many phone calls for days, a friend left a message saying he was tired of playing phone tag. Siminoff immediately called his chief marketing officer (at 6:30 in the morning) and told him to buy the domain. But PhoneTag.com was taken.

Four months and $30,000 later, he bought the domain, and today SimulScribe is changing its name to PhoneTag. It is a much better name. SimulScribe was so off-putting somehow, but PhoneTag sounds fun. What do readers think, will it make any difference?

In celebration of its new name. PhoneTag is giving away a free 30-day trial plus a special “F*#@ Voicemail” T-shirt to the first 100 TechCrunch readers who sign up here. The service is also launching a new feature today. You upload your contacts from Outlook, Mac Address Book, Gmail, or Yahoo, and every time you get a voicemail from a contact, you can email them back. That’s the kind of phone tag I could play all day.