sipgate

It seems so simple. I just want to be able to receive calls on my computer using my headset. I also listen to music on my computer all day long, though, and I use the speakers for that. I don't want the headset plugged in all day, because Windows automatically switches everything over to the headset when it gets plugged in, so if I keep the headset plugged in I'll have to listen to my music (not to mention all my other system sounds and alerts) through them instead of the speakers. I want to be able to hear or see that my phone is ringing, then plug in the headset, and then answer the call using the headset.

Finally, VOIP provider sipgate got some more phone numbers (they had run out!), and I snagged one (I think it's in California, because there are no Oklahoma numbers yet, but that doesn't matter to me). I downloaded the sipgate softphone software and got it all installed and set up. I saw that I could set my USB headset as the default audio device... awesome!

So I got everything set up right, tested it (success! A crystal-clear phone call on my headset!), and then unplugged my headset and got back to my regularly scheduled work. And that's when the problem happened.

The next time I received a call, I heard it ring... on my PC speakers! No problem, I thought... I can plug in the headset real quick. After all, my other software switches over automatically when the headset is plugged in. Some of it (like Rhapsody, for example) doesn't switch until a certain point (Rhapsody will continue to play the song it's playing through the speakers, but when the next song comes on, it comes on the headset), but they always switch.

Not sipgate! The only way sipgate will work with the headset, it seems, is if the headset is plugged in both when I start up the software, and when the call initially rings. If the headset isn't plugged in on the first ring, no luck. It won't even switch when you actually answer the call; presumably the software keeps the audio device open the whole time, from first ring to the call is terminated.

Now, when the headset is unplugged from the machine, it automatically disappears from the Control Panel "Sounds and Audio Devices" applet's Audio tab selectors, so if the headset is the default device (which it is on this machine), it is the default device only when it is plugged in... when it is disconnected, another device ("SoundMAX HD Audio" - my speakers) automatically becomes the default, which means when I'm ready to get on Skype or WebEx, I just plug the headset in and I'm ready to go. But just to experiment, I plugged in the headset and then opened up Sounds and Audio Devices from Windows Control Panel and automatically set up SoundMAX HD Audio as the default Windows device. Then I made sure the Logitech headset was the default device in sipgate settings. My music was coming through the speakers (the default device), but, in theory, sipgate should use the headset, as configured on the settings page.

Guess what happened? My calls went to the speakers! The setting in sipgate was not honored at all. I would accept having the computer speakers as the default output and having to switch other software manually from time to time, but the sipgate softphone apparently doesn't allow me that option. I even tried out some software called "Virtual Audio Cable" which I was hoping would allow me to intercept traffic coming from sipgate and send it directly to the sound card, but I'm pretty sure even it won't do that for me... or if it will, it would be an advanced configuration of some kind, and I don't have the time to explore it in enough depth to figure that out.

For the record, the sound quality of sipgate seems very good. The features of the service look impressive. I could definitely see myself using it on an ongoing basis... I could even see someone using it as a kind of voice mail-only drop box that was never even used for outgoing calls. If my company ever starts looking for a PBX in the cloud, I'll definitely throw their name into the hat (assuming they obtain some Oklahoma numbers before then, or make it possible to port over existing numbers). Presumably, sipgate works exceptionally well with hardware VOIP phones (that seems to be a core of their business). But they're not making it easy for poor little me, with nothing but the softphone and a USB headset.

Blue-Screen Mashup

Yesterday my computer started unexpectedly rebooting. At first it happened sort of randomly during sessions, but after four or five reboots, it became completely unusable. It would boot all the way up into Windows, but as soon as we tried to start up an application, the screen would go dark, then a blue stop error screen would flash up there for a split second, then it would go back to the BIOS screen and start again from scratch! I had no idea what I was going to do, until I remembered a suggestion I read years ago from Fred Langa. The suggestion was that you could document an error screen using your digital camera. Since the screen was gone before I had a chance to read it, I figured that was the only way I was going to find out what the error was!

After a few tries to get the timing down, I got this blurry-but-mostly-readable shot of the screen:

By zooming into the shot on the camera, I was able to make out enough of the text to guess that I had a full hard disk. This made me wonder if I would be able to boot into Safe Mode so I could clear out some space. The Safe Mode trick worked, but it turned out I was not low on space at all! I ran CCleaner anyway, and then rebooted, and after that the machine worked fine. I suspect it may have had something to do with corrupt files in the Prefetcher, but I don't know for sure... all I know is that after clearing out unnecessary files with CCleaner, the machine started working again. So even though the camera may not have directly helped me in the long run, it did help me get past the mental block of not knowing what to do. Try it!

Google Voice Desktop App

It all started back up in April, with a TechCrunch article. Either that or it started in November, depending on how you figure it. Sit back for a minute and I'll review things for ya.

Okay, let me back up. If you've been reading this blog, you know that I'm a HUGE fan of Google Voice. You also may remember the post when I discovered that Google had bought Gizmo5. At the time I speculated that Google was incorporating the Gizmo5 dialer into Google Talk, Google's (somewhat confusingly-named, since you "Talk" with your "Voice") IM client. (I didn't realize then that Google Talk is a Windows-only product... which probably has something to do with what comes next.)

This past April, TechCrunch broke an article that said that Google was "dogfooding" their upcoming desktop application for Google Voice (the term "dogfooding" taken from the phrase "eating your own dog food," meaning that they were testing it internally before "feeding" it to anyone else). Pretty exciting news! It made it sound like the app was right around the corner!

Hopes were dashed in June when statements from within Google made it clear that the desktop app was probably never going to be released, in favor of incorporating the Gizmo5 technology into Gmail. But then last week, TechCrunch somehow managed to get their hands on something pretty amazing: one of the internal versions of the application! For Mac, no less! Since then, there's been quite a buzz online about it, at least in tech blogs and news sites. There is even an online petition asking Google to release it (if you're interested, please visit GiveUsGVDesktop.com and sign it!) Who knows if that petition and the online noise will even figure into Google's planning at all, but it couldn't hurt.

In the meantime, I've been looking for other options. I saw in this article that it was possible to simulate the Gizmo5 experience using a free service from sipgate (yay!), but then learned that sipgate is also out of commission (they're out of numbers... D'OH!) My other best idea is to use Skype with a free service called ring2skype to simulate the same thing. Sure would be nice to not have to do that, though. Come on, Google... let's have the desktop app!

update: Ring2Skype won't work with Google Voice... you have to key in an extension number to make the call to Skype. It's still a pretty cool service, though!

Google Chrome browser

I've been a Firefox browser user for quite some time - gosh, it must be at least five or six years at this point. But a month or so ago, I read something that convinced me that I should give Google Chrome another chance. From the beginning, Google has claimed that Chrome was more stable because of it's architecture; each new browser tab is its own process, so crashing one will not, in theory, crash all of them (they even made a virtual comic book about it to explain it better). The article I read said that Chrome has made some strides in speed over the other browsers, and I had been increasingly dissatisfied particularly with startup time in Firefox. Chrome also recently (finally) started supporting extensions, which are a favorite feature of Firefox, so I decided to dip my toes in and give it a try!

First I had to try and find some extensions that resembled the ones I use every day on Firefox. I had been using Echofon as my Twitter client; I didn't find anything I was happy with as a Twitter client, but eventually I tried out the desktop version of TweetDeck and now I use it instead (I even uninstalled Echofon from Firefox). I installed the Chrome version of Shareaholic (which, incidentally, I like better than the Firefox version... come on, guys, let's implement that "save your services in the cloud" thing on Firefox!) and WiseStamp, and both were wonderful. The Chrome version of Xmarks is also terrific. I couldn't find a direct port of Gmail Notifier, which is a staple for me, so I tried Google's tray app (ew) and finally discovered the excellent Chrome extension One Number which not only notifies of new Gmail messages, but also handles notifications for Google Reader, Google Voice, and Google Wave. Nice!

On the whole, I was able to find Chrome extensions that either are the same thing as Firefox extensions, or have basically the same functionality. The one cross-browser extension that I was really disappointed in was iMacros. The Firefox version is pretty solid, and in fact I use it almost every day, but the Chrome version (which, to be fair, is still in beta) is slow and buggy. I actually had to resort to opening up Firefox whenever I needed to use iMacros... not high praise for their Chrome development efforts.

Another thing I use quite extensively on Firefox is called "search shortcuts". If I type g Google Chrome into my browser URL bar, it's the same as if I loaded up Google.com and typed Google Chrome into the search box. If I type gn Google Chrome instead, it looks it up on Google News. Setting this up in Firefox is incredibly easy (if you don't know how, check this link for details), and it uses regular bookmarks, which means that my search shortcuts get synchronized through Xmarks so I only have to set them up once for many installations of Firefox. It is possible to set up something similar in Chrome, but it is convoluted and it does not use regular bookmarks, so you have to set it up on each installation of Chrome. That was my first sign that Chrome might not work out for me.

My next indicator came on my underpowered old machine at home. The first time I tried Chrome, the day it was first released, I found it too memory-hungry to run reliably on a computer without gobs of memory for it to chow down on. I discovered that things haven't gotten much better; eventually I had to quit using Chrome on my home machine. I did keep using it at work, though, hoping that it would prove more stable than Firefox. Firefox is by no means a crashy browser, but it does crater every once in a while; I wanted to see if Chrome could best it in the stability department.

Once again I was disappointed. In my experience and with my usage patterns, Chrome seems to crash just about as often as Firefox... it just has its own special ways of crashing. And it's not at good at recovering my session when I restart it, either. With Firefox, when I crash usually I get most or all of my tabs back when I restart; with Chrome that rarely works, even though it's supposed to. In addition, Chrome doesn't seem to like to be left alone for any amount of time; if I left it running for an hour and went to lunch, often when I tried to use it again it would be non-responsive.

Yesterday I gave up on Chrome and went back to using Firefox everywhere. Except for a few extensions that I liked a lot on Chrome and which aren't available for Firefox, I couldn't really find anything about Chrome that would give it an advantage. Firefox is a solid, mature browser with lots of functionality and a large user base; Chrome is a fairly young browser with some style and flash, but not as much substance behind the glamor as I had hoped. I wish Chrome the best, and maybe at some point I'll give it another spin, but for now, I'm still a Firefox fan.

Online Privacy

Recently a friend of mine posted this on her Facebook profile:

WARNING! As of today, there is a new privacy setting called "Instant Personalization" that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to "Allow." Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites ...and uncheck "Allow", then repost this to your profile.

A few hours later, another friend posted this:

FYI EVERYONE- There's a site called Spokeo.com and it's an online phone book that has a picture of your house, credit score, profession, age, how many people live in the house. Remove yourself by the Privacy button on the bottom right. (passing along, scary stuff!) I personally checked it out and it is really there!! some of the info was off but its there!!! COPY, PASTE AND REPOST

These are basically unrelated issues, but they both touch on something that I don't think people understand very well: Internet privacy. Let's take the first one first, and think about each them a little bit.

If you are using Facebook, some information about you is publicly available, and that's that. There's a lot of stuff that you can hide from public view, but some of it you can't. Your name, for example. Your profile picture. Some of the stuff you are a "fan" of. To find out what of your profile anyone doing a Google search can see, simply log into Facebook, click "Profile", create a bookmark, log back out of Facebook, and then click your bookmark. You may be surprised at what you see... your status updates may be public, for example. There are several levels of security, including "Friends Only", "Friends of Friends", and so on. I won't try to go into very much detail here (because chances are, Facebook will change things and my blog post will wind up being inaccurate) but you really need to look into a few things:

1. Take a look at Facebook's privacy policy to see if you really agree with everything it says.
2. Read over articles like this one and this one, which will explain some of the privacy issues to you and maybe help you tweak things.
3. Really, be aware of your privacy settings. Currently they are under Account > Privacy Settings (like the post mentions) and you might be able to go right there using this link, if you're logged in. But don't look at only that one checkbox; click through every page, and carefully consider every option. Only allow the stuff you really want allowed.

Now, as far as the "Instant Personalization" setting is concerned: my opinion is that the concern is a bit overblown. Basically, what that setting does is it allows sites that you are visiting anyway to know what Facebook knows about you and shares with people who are on Facebook but who are not your "friends." It's how Pandora knew who my friends were when I started messing with it earlier this week; it told me which of my friends prefer Big Band and which of them prefer Sade. When a song from a favorite artist of theirs comes up, I see their Facebook profile picture.

Does that creep you out? Well, then be creeped by this: any child-molester on the Internet has the same access to your information. Every serial killer and wacko can know what "Instant Personalization" knows, just by having a Facebook account and looking you up. Kind of puts Pandora knowing who your buddies are in perspective, doesn't it? If you don't care for that idea, maybe you shouldn't be on Facebook at all. Signing up for Facebook essentially equates to making a very minor celebrity out of you, so expect paparazzi if you go there.

(And if you are worried about Instant Personalization, allow me to introduce you to the privacy implications of Facebook Applications, such as Farmville, Farm Town, Mafia Wars, etc. which have access to much more information than Instant Personalization does. Might want to check those settings, too.)

So let's consider the second post, the one about spokeo. This is a service that compiles publicly-available information and repackages it for sale. The creepiness isn't the spokeo site; that's just plain old commerce. The creepiness is that the information is publicly available somewhere in the first place! Spokeo is like a used bookstore; they don't create the information, and they aren't even the primary source; they just compile it and sell it at a price. In fact, if you check the Snopes article about it, you'll find this link to another panic about a similar site, ZabaSearch, which was freaking people out by doing the exact same thing five years ago (they're still doing it). In fact, I'll add another one: put your land line phone number or address into WhitePages Reverse Lookup and you're likely to find your name (and maybe others who live in your house; it found my wife's name as well). And they'll sell you more information for a price, too. (Cell phone numbers don't turn up the same granularity of information as land lines because of legal differences.) Heck, type your land line phone number into Google, and with one additional click you'll see a map to your house. So the fact is, spokeo isn't anything unique or frightening... or at least it's not unique. It's fairly common on the Internet.

For the record, all of these services have "remove me from your list" functions, but before you get wrapped up in that, consider this: it is possible to get your phone number unlisted from the telephone book, but the majority of people do not. Why? Because you want to be found. The phone book (probably) has your name, phone number, and address in it. That's easily enough information to physically locate you, if someone wants to. And if you've ever told a stranger that it was your birthday, and if you also told him your name, that's just about enough information right there for identity theft (never tell a stranger anything that someone from a bank would ask you as a "security question", particularly your Social Security Number!) In the thoroughly-networked, cameras-everywhere, cell-phone-toting, information-addicted, credit-driven society we live in, information about you is literally in the very air. If you want to get off the grid, throw away that phone with the GPS capabilities, close out your bank accounts and credit cards and go cash-only, and then quit your job and move to the woods, because almost everything you do in this day and age leaves a footprint.

Hundreds of years ago when most of the world was very rural and communities were small, everyone knew everything about one another. To some extent, in small communities (little towns, schools, workplaces, churches) this is often still the case, but otherwise as a society we've somehow gotten the idea that we have some kind of anonymity, that unless we want them to, it's not nice for someone to know things about us. But the fact is, there have always been reams of publicly-available information about each of us out there somewhere. It's how modern society has always functioned. A bank that can't find out anything about you won't lend you money to buy a car; a prospective employer expects the chance to talk to your previous employers to find out if you fit into their organization. We use information to make educated decisions, and computers do nothing more effectively than they store and compare information. Don't be surprised to find details about yourself on the Internet, but do consider which pieces (for example, your Social Security Number) need to be protected, and which pieces need not be guarded as closely. Pick your battles wisely. Otherwise, that cave out in the wilderness might as well be your home.

(To find out what kinds of things about you that Facebook might be sharing with the whole wide world, visit http://zesty.ca/facebook/ and click the "How do I find my Facebook ID?" link to get started. Most of the categories will likely show you nothing, but check these categories, which might show you some information about yourself or others: "feeds", "likes", "links", "tagged", "posts")

Google Buzz

One week ago, nobody outside of Google had ever heard of Google Buzz. Even those in the tech news industry were mystified, although there were rumors out there: "We have just received an invite to attend an event at Google’s headquarters where it will be `unveiling some product innovations in two of [its] most popular products'," one tech blog said. There was speculation on all sides (I was hoping for a rebirth/reopening of Gizmo5, myself) but I don't think anyone quite expected what they showed us that day. Facebook and Twitter were the front-runners in social networking; MySpace was nearly a distant memory, and Friendster was already a distant memory. Google's social networking site was Orkut, and it was very popular... in Brazil. Nobody expected them to try again!

Since then, Google claims that like nine bazillion posts have been made to Google Buzz, and I'm pretty sure that at least that many articles about Buzz have appeared on tech news sites... but honestly, my social contacts are still all on Facebook and Twitter. The people I'm connected with on Google Buzz are largely the same people I'm connected to on Twitter. Despite all of the hype about how many built-in users Buzz has because of the integration with Gmail, I haven't seen a lot of activity on Buzz quite yet (except mostly stuff that's getting imported from Twitter or Google Reader). I love the idea of Buzz, and I think Google has every chance of building a service that beats the pants off Facebook for sheer robustness (if you've read my rant about Facebook, you'll know that I think Facebook is a very good idea which is very broken), but I have a serious wish list for Buzz... it's good as it is, but as far as I'm concerned it's just not at the point yet where I can tell my friends, "You've GOTTA try this! It's SO much better than Facebook!"

Now, in some ways, Buzz IS better than Facebook. I think it embeds pictures and videos better. It's much less crash-prone. It loads quickly, and it certainly is handy to have it right there in my Gmail. And you can even EDIT your own posts... it's like magic! But there are a few niggling things that Google could probably roll out fairly quickly that would make the experience SO much better. For example, Google needs to set up a way for users to automatically activate the much-described "get the Buzz messages out of my inbox" filter. I honestly wonder if anyone is really using the "Buzz to my inbox" feature... I mean, Buzz is basically ALREADY in my inbox! It takes more clicks to delete the Buzz email than it does to actually check Buzz for new stuff. Google needs a "no Buzz to my inbox" setting.

Buzz needs WYSIWYG editing. Now, Buzz has hidden support for boldface, italics, and strikethrough (does anyone actually use strikethrough?) by enclosing your text in _underscore characters_ for italics or *asterisks* for boldface (or both for strikethrough), but come on, Google... give us WYSIWYG. This is not a hard thing; it already exists in Gmail and Blogger. That alone will give it a leg up on Twitter and Facebook, neither of which has any text formatting capability.

Why is there no "Re-Buzz" or "Share" feature? Twitter and Facebook BOTH have this, and people love to share stuff they've found. I even saw an article today that more people use Facebook as their jumping-off point to the Web now than use Google, which blows my mind! People want to share stuff they find, even if they find it on Buzz. Come on, Google... how hard can this be? There's a lot of potential there for users to meet like-minded friends-of-friends and begin to share directly with those new contacts, too.

And hey... what about a link (other than the now-common Google Reader hack) to "Buzz This Page"? Such a thing exists for Facebook and Twitter, and I use them all the time. Maybe this is going to be part of the upcoming roll-out of hooks into and out of Buzz, but it would have made a lot of sense to give us that capability right from the first.

One thing that's cool about Buzz is that you can "mute" a post. The post slowly fades into invisibility, and it looks pretty cool. But in order to make that happen, you have to select "Mute this post" from a drop-down menu, and I mute posts so often that I can't imagine why you wouldn't want this to be an icon or top-level item instead of a 2-click thing. And I can also see people getting pretty cranky about the fade-out, too... it's just long enough to get on people's nerves. I think it ought to be something you can turn off (although I would leave it on, myself).

There needs to be an easy way to collapse a bunch of comments on a post. Facebook doesn't have this, and oddly it never felt like it was "missing" on Facebook, but on Google Buzz it seems like a glaring omission. A "collapse all" would be nice, too.

And there really needs to be an OBVIOUS way to turn Buzz off. There is a link at the very bottom of the screen, but that link is not "obvious"... I would never have found it if I hadn't seen it referred to in a news post. For something as intrusive as Buzz, there needs to be a big red "off" switch with neon arrows pointing at it, because otherwise people are going to be really unhappy about it (in fact, people have ALREADY been unhappy about it).

There needs to be a landing page for links into a particular Buzz account. The Google Profile basically serves this purpose but it's not particularly Buzz-specific. How about a single page where a friend can see all of my public Buzz posts, and only my public Buzz posts? Twitter has it. Why not Buzz?

Now that I've got all of my "tweaks" off my chest, I want to move on to something else: things I think need to be added to Buzz. With some or all of the tweaks I've recommended, Buzz could be at least as good as Facebook and Twitter, and maybe a little better where finesse is called for. With the additions I'm calling for, Buzz could truly be a SERIOUSLY killer app.

My number one wish is for Buzz to use existing hooks into Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites to turn buzz into an aggregator for existing sites as well as a new platform. I'd like to see a dual-screen situation where you can flip over to another tab and be able to see what you would see if you were on other sites, and maybe even add comments to those sites, and then flip back over to your Buzz account and add posts to that. (Using the tips from this article I've actually set up my Gmail account so that I can access Facebook and Twitter directly from Gmail anyway, but it would be wonderful to not have to resort to add-ons to do so.) Even more critical is the ability to post something to Buzz and simultaneously cross-post it to Facebook and/or Twitter (and any other social networks that will be supported.) The advantages of doing this are, to me, fairly obvious... the user has the advantage of one-stop status update posting, and Buzz can have the advantage (especially in the case of 140-characters-only Twitter) of getting to link through to the Buzz version of the post. This functionality alone, I believe, will bring new users to Buzz. And once they are using Buzz for all of their publishing, Buzz will quickly become their network of choice, with other social sites becoming at best places to play Flash games, and at worst, simply convenient avenues to get status updates into Buzz.

There really needs to be a standalone, not-in-Gmail experience of Buzz. Google has acknowledged that this is a possible upcoming addition, and I think it would be a great idea, if only for people who are maybe a little bit Gmail-phobic and don't want to feel like they are creating a new email account that they don't want. (This may yet happen.) Another new incarnation I could see for Buzz would be adding more Buzz functionality directly into Google Reader. Right now Reader works fairly well with Buzz, but it would be nice to see some Buzz flow back into Reader instead of just having Reader content flow into Buzz.

A consequence of tighter integration with other sites will be something that has come up for me already: feedback loops. If I have my Buzz posts flowing out to Twitter AND my Twitter posts flowing back into Buzz, I will get every post showing up both places twice! As it is right now, I would like to syndicate my Google Reader posts out to Twitter, but they are already flowing into Buzz, and if I syndicate them in Twitter, they will turn up on Buzz twice... and because of that, I haven't syndicated my Reader posts out to Twitter.

One way that could be eliminated would be to incorporate Gmail's filtering capabilities into Buzz. For example, I would love to be able to filter my Twitter posts and never Buzz the ones that, for example, start with "Read this: " and then I could prefix my Google Reader tweets that way. It would be great to filter posts from some of my contacts, too... kind of an "auto-mute" so that (for example) I never see posts containing the word "beer" from a college-partying friend, or never see posts with pictures attached from a friend who posts way too many photos of his car.

I like that Buzz already has "allow-only" private posting, so if I have my family members organized into a group called "Family" I can create a buzz that is only visible to my family. Google should follow Facebook's lead and add the inverse of this, so that I can "deny" a group as well. So if I have a group called "Denver" and some of my "Family" group members are also living in the "Denver" group, I could "allow" the "Family" group and "deny" the "Denver" group, and only family members who do not live in Denver would see the post.

Last but not least, I really think Google should allow syndicating RSS feeds into your Buzz stream. Third-party sites (like Twitterfeed) are going to do this eventually anyway, and this would allow information from a multitude of other sources to flow easily into Buzz. Allowing input from RSS feeds is a key to getting even more of people's online identity into Buzz. I would also like to see customizable RSS feeds out from Buzz, so that I could create feeds that do not include information from certain sources or that are filtered by keywords or other criteria. This would be another way that users could deal with the feedback loop problem I mentioned before... if I could generate a feed from my Google Buzz that includes all sources except my Twitter information, I could syndicate that feed back to Twitter and never get a duplicate post. It would also be useful to be able to customize the titles of the items in the feeds; the single outgoing Google Buzz feed is configured in such a way that it really needs some post-processing to be useful... and I don't have time to learn Yahoo Pipes (and does Google really want their information to be processed through a Yahoo service anyway??)

Google Buzz has so much potential. Google creates very solid online software... much better than Facebook's unattractive and accident-prone offering. And although Google doesn't have a perfect record on this account, they do have a much better uptime track record that Twitter, whose "fail whale" page that informs users that the system is down has become something of a pop-culture icon (and when your "our site is down" page is famous, that is known as a BAD thing!) My take on the first week of Google Buzz is that Google has gotten off to a somewhat feeble start, when they could have come out of the gate like a race horse if they had only implemented ALL of the functions of FriendFeed, which Buzz is unabashedly modeled after. But in the current online climate, I think Google has a lot of motivation to make the service better, and they have a lot of potential to make it really dynamite. Even if you're not actively using Buzz yet, I think it's a good idea to keep an eye on it. It may be the next revolution in social networking!

Google Voice

"GrandCentral is the BOMB!" I read on a message board. It was late 2008, and I had never heard of GrandCentral before, but I looked it up and it was looking pretty cool. Using GrandCentral I could get a brand-new phone number for free, and set things up so that calling that number would ring me up at work or at home! I wouldn't have to give people an either-or on a phone number any more! And since it is frowned upon where I work to give out the private "direct" number to people other than immediate family (instead having people call the switchboard and speak to our very sweet receptionist), I figured I might be able to give out this number to friends and not give them the direct line number.

Well, I was right on all counts... I was able to set things up so people could reach me at home or at work, and there are a number of other great advantages I gained as well. GrandCentral, now re-branded Google Voice, also allows me to get my personal voice mails in my Google Voice account (while my work voice mails land in my work voice mail), and even set up a schedule so that my Google Voice number doesn't ring my home phone during the day when my wife is at home but I'm at work. It's great!

There have been so many good tutorials and posts of Google Voice features that I'm not going to waste too much time rehashing easy-to-find information. Even I have already mentioned Gizmo5+Google Voice on this blog, and I've also already mentioned Google Voice's cell phone applications here as well. If you have a cell phone (I do not), you can have GV ring both your land line and your cell phone, and then you can answer whichever one is convenient. In fact, you can switch your call from one to the other midstream (for example, I could answer my Google Voice call at work, switch to my cell phone for the bus ride home, and then when I got home, switch to my land line, and the person on the phone need never know the conversation happened on three separate phones). There are tons of cool features to talk about, but I wanted to mention the very few things that I wish were different about Google Voice.

The one that bugs me the most right now is that Google has not yet re-released Gizmo5 after acquiring it. I even took a look at eBay for accounts... sure enough, they are there to be had! Funny how people will pay twenty bucks for something they could have gotten for free a month ago! :) Once Google reopens Gizmo5 (I expect its capabilities to be folded into Google Talk, myself) I will be able to answer my GV calls through my computer headset. And that will be AWESOME!

I wish Google Voice was able to support SMS short codes. These are the five- or six-digit "text this number with your cell phone" codes that usually connect you with services (for example, in the U.S. you can tweet to Twitter by texting your tweet to 40404, or update your Facebook by texting 32665). The way I understand it, on regular land-line service the number is sent a digit at a time, but on cell phones the number is sent all at once, which makes these short codes possible, and they are by agreement between cell phone carriers. My assumption is that because Google Voice is not a cell phone carrier, it does not have access to those agreements. It's a shame, because SMS short codes are so prevalent these days that I know this one thing is enough to turn people off from using Google Voice exclusively. I use the SMS-to-a-full-cell-number feature almost daily, though, and it works great! Even without a cell phone, I can text friends. It's kind of hard to explain to them, actually!

Google Voice also does not support MMS messages, which are multimedia SMS-style messages (if you've ever texted someone a snapshot on your phone, you've used this). For some people this is apparently a deal-breaker, but honestly, these days everybody's phone has email. Why would you want to send this kind of stuff via text message?

It would sure be nice for Google to roll out wide support for porting cell phone numbers to GV. This has been being talked about for some time now, and I have actually read articles from people who have been allowed to do it... but it's not easy or free (actually, according to Google, it's not even available yet). There is a procedure you can go through to set up your cell phone so that calls go to Google Voice voice mail instead of your carrier's voice mail, so that's partway there, but that's just a consolation prize. One more thing that might cause a long-time cell-phone user to not try it out.

Recently an idea occurred to me that would be a super-cool addition to Google Voice. I sent it in on their feedback form, but I thought I would share it here as a dream feature that I hope they will add one day. For background, I mentioned that I have Google Voice ring my home phone, but only outside of business hours when I can be expected to be home, not during the day when I'm at the office but my wife is home. You can set up individual ring schedules for each telephone you list with Google Voice, and there are two separate schedules, a "weekday" schedule and a "weekend" schedule. So on my "weekday" schedule, I have my home phone ringing only between the time I generally get home after work and the time I generally leave the next morning, and I have my office phone ringing during our normal office hours. On the weekend I have the home phone ringing and the office phone not ringing. If I had a cell phone, I would probably set it up to ring all of the time. What I would like to see would be a third ring schedule, a "holiday" or "vacation" schedule. This would be the phones you want to ring, say, on Memorial Day, which would normally be a weekday "work" day but which you might get off work for, or say on the week that you take the family to Disney World for vacation. When I'm at home on a 3-day weekend, I do need my home phone to ring, but I don't need my office phone to ring, but when the holiday is over, I need to revert to my original settings. Right now I have to change everything manually, which is an unnecessary hassle.

Now, to digress a little bit, GV has a "Do Not Disturb" mode that automatically sends all calls to voice mail without ringing the phone at all. Do Not Disturb mode is easily activated by clicking "Settings" and then the "Calls" tab and then checking a checkbox. Turning it off is even easier; the Google Voice screen has a "'Do Not Disturb' is enabled. Disable now" link right at the top of the screen. I would like to see my proposed "holiday mode" set up to trigger in two ways: one way would be manually, by checking or unchecking a checkbox, and the other way would be on a schedule. So I could set the first and last days of my vacation weeks ahead of time, and then it wouldn't be one more thing I would have to remember between plane schedules, luggage, putting a stop on the mail, etc. With enough flexibility, I could set up the holidays in my Google Voice the first week of January when the yearly holiday calendar is distributed at work, and not have to think about it again until twelve months later. How cool would that be?

I could go on and on about Google Voice's amazing features... voice-mail notifications in my email in-box, receiving and replying to SMS messages via my email account, email-style spam filtering of phone calls, customized outgoing message per contact (I could set it so my mom hears "Hi mom!" when she calls me, for example), contacts shared with Gmail address book, contacts available on the Web and on your cell phone, call "screening" by listening in (like you used to do with your Code-a-Phone machine back in the day!), free calls any time of day to anywhere in the United States. But I'll just end by saying that Google Voice has succeeded in making a huge number of telephone-related things much easier for me. I'm excited to see what Google has in mind for Gizmo5, and I'm interested in using a cell phone with Google Voice integrated into it, and I think Google Voice is a product that just about anyone could use and be thrilled with. I would pay for it if it cost money to use it; that's how indispensable it is. If one of the cell-phone carriers had anywhere near this kind of offering in their plan's online site, they would win customers because of it.

I'm just glad that my mom only has to remember one number to call me at work or home. "Hi mom!"