Google Voice

I was fortunate enough to get invites to both Google Voice and Google Wave this week, but for now I’m going to stick with discussing Google Voice. This is mostly because nobody I know has Google Wave yet and, for a product that’s about collaboration with other people, it makes it hard to form an educated opinion about its usefulness.

Google Voice is a new service from Google which lets you link multiple phone numbers (home phone, work phone, mobile, etc.) to one new number of your choosing, as long as it’s available.  You can search for numbers via keyword (for example your name), area code or zip code.  Once you’ve chosen your new number all you have to do is link your pre-existing numbers to that one and you’ll have access to the host of cool features that Google Voice provides.

The most obvious feature Google Voice provides is call forwarding.  Using the site’s settings you can set Google Voice to forward calls and messages to one of your various phones automatically.  For example, you could set your work phone to only receive Google Voice calls between 9 and 5 on weekdays, or your home phone to only receive calls on weekends.  You can even setup and manage certain groups of contacts and set the default phone for each – for example, if you want to direct work calls to your mobile phone you can do that.

The next feature I like is getting Google into some hot water with carriers – free SMS messaging.  From the Google Voice website you can send text messages to any phone, for free.  Many people have presumed that this feature alone is why the Google Voice application was denied from Apple’s App Store.  You can be sure that AT&T wasn’t too excited about the idea.

One of the best features you get with Google Voice is the purest form of free visual voicemail I’ve ever seen.  Voicemails sent to your Google Voice account are automatically transcribed to text and forwarded to the Google Voice website where you have an inbox for all incoming messages.  The transcriptions are surprisingly accurate, but you can also playback the message from the website if there are a few missed words.  As you would expect, from your Google Voice inbox you can read incoming messages as though you were reading email from your Gmail inbox.  You can search for messages, leave notes to yourself and even add stars to important messages so you can come back to them later.

All said I think Google Voice is an excellent service.  I can only hope that someone at Apple or AT&T decides to let the application through to the App Store.  If not, you can bet that Google will work on a mobile web version of Google Voice like they’ve done with most of their other services, and we’ll get access to it anyways.

Google’s Eric Schmidt Resigns from Apple Board of Directors

This is a very interesting development given very recent conflicts between Google and Apple/AT&T.  Sure, Steve Jobs has stated that Eric’s resignation was a mutual decision made by both companies because Google’s encroachment on familiar territory is becoming a conflict of interest.  Still, Android has been out for some time, so why now?

One of the biggest stories last week was Apple’s denial of the Google Voice application on the iTunes app store.  The dispute has since been consumed by the gaze of the FCC to determine if this choice was made by AT&T moreso than Apple, or if AT&T in any way influences the content found on the App Store.  If that’s the case, as it may very well be, the ruling could be important for a couple reasons.

1. Consumers have one more reason to detest AT&T
2. It gives no logical support for the claim that the denial of Google applications has anything to do with Schmidt’s descent from the board
3. Consumers have one more reason to dete….oh, I already said that one

Honestly though it doesn’t sound like Apple’s style to bend to the will of AT&T.  They love their products enough to say something to the affect of “Listen, we have a product that has made you millions, you think this app conflicts with your service then tough cookies – we’re working on a Verizon version of the iPhone anyways.”  I’m getting off-track here.

Does this departure setup a feud between Apple and Google?  The two companies have seemed almost philosophically aligned for some time now, and most pundits don’t really consider Android or what we know of Chrome OS as major threats in their individual markets (phone and PC operating systems).  All this time it has been Microsoft who has been desperately trying to compete with the big G, and just when it seems that they’re making a solid go of it the focus might be shifting towards an Apple/Google main event instead.

There is one area in which the philosophies of Apple and Google conflict, however.  Openness.  It’s been proclaimed that this might be the achilles heel of Apple.  Google always happily opens up their projects to developers while Apple severely shies away from such behavior.  Sure, the iTunes App Store is extremely successful, but the only complaint we seem to hear about weekly is that certain apps get shot down for seemingly silly reasons, and of course Apple’s proprietary take on their hardware and software is always criticized.  If Apple had the market share Windows does, they’d have one of the worst monopolies we’ve ever seen.

The only thing we could possibly say Google has a monopoly on is the search engine market, but with Bing approaching 10%+ market share that’s not as much of a compelling case.

Have 2 hours to kill? Want to know more about Google Wave?

If you answered yes to these two questions I have a video just for you!  The video below weighs in at an impressive 120 minutes, and is (from what I can tell after watching the first 5) a thorough demonstration of Google Wave and its API.

Google’s Android takes the stage

On Tuesday, T-Mobile had their event to launch the first Google Android phone on the market.  Coming to the US on October 22nd, the T-Mobile HTC G1 will be available in most T-Mobile stores for $179 ($20 less than the iPhone 3G) and, of course, will feature Google’s Android operating system.  So, what does that mean?  Well, aside from having great compatibility with Google’s applications (they described a normal Gmail experience – labels, email search, even Google Talk) they’re pushing the open sourced nature of the Android operating system.

Most people, whether fair or not, are looking at Google’s Android as a competitor to Apple’s iPhone.  It’s a hard justification to make since Android is just an operating system while the iPhone encapsulates both hardware and software, but given the nature of the two companies it’s an easy conclusion to jump to (both are traditionally tech companies now trying to make a bid in the mobile phone industry).  The only reason I mention this is because, as I said, Android is open source.  That’s a completely different approach than the one Apple took obviously.  Android will have the benefit of having developers making 3rd-party applications from day 1 as opposed to Apple’s delayed delivery of the App Store this year.  My only question is the certification process with Android applications.  Sure Apple’s system is generally a closed one, but that enables certification of applications so the store isn’t filled with garbage that no one wants.  Of course you could assume that Android apps will basically be regulated by users.  If you go to download an application and everyone is saying it’s terrible, chances are you’ll stay away from it.

Anyways, back to the G1 and the T-Mobile event.  When I started watching the stream one of the first things the representative from T-Mobile mentioned was that they were offering a $25 limited data plan and a $35 full data plan.  This news made me very excited.  After all, a $35 phone plan with unlimited data?  What’s not to love?  When Android was first announced there were a lot of musings about Google maybe giving free service with some ad placement, but cheap service was fine for me.  At least it would have been – one of the attendees was smart enough to ask whether their $25/$35 plans were standalone, or if they required a standard voice plan as well.  They require a voice plan.  So then, the T-Mobile plan is only slightly cheaper than the iPhone’s data plans.  That’s too bad, because I think if they had come out with cheap 3G access they could have gained a lot of interest from consumers still on the fence about getting an iPhone.

Some of the specifications of the G1 I noted while watching the stream were that it’s compatible with Microsoft document formats, it does have wifi built-in despite being meant for 3G, and it has a fully-functioning web browser (like Safari) based on webkit.  Webkit is the base for Google Chrome so that’s not entirely unexpected, and the representative from T-Mobile even referred to Android’s web browser as a sort of “Chrome Lite.”  The device also supports most audio file formats, even the default iTunes AAC, but it won’t work with iTunes DRM-locked songs.  There’s built-in GPS, an accelerometer, an application store (called the App Market), a touchscreen, and of course a camera.  So, at a glance, the G1 is comparable in features to the iPhone.

The question really comes down to user interface I think.  I’ll give Google props for not going the obvious route and blatantly copying the iPhone, but instead taking their own approach.  It looks kind of similar to a PC desktop to me…not necessarily a variant of Windows, but it definitely has a ring of “this is your PC desktop on a phone.”  The icons look like standard desktop icons.  The applications don’t have that same uniformity as iPhone applications share with the rest of the phone’s user interface.  Still I can’t comment much on the UI because I haven’t used one, I can only go off of what I’ve seen in videos like this:

So then, is the G1 important?  Yes.  It gives a lot of promise to people looking for an alternative and open source variation of the iPhone.  As I mentioned it shares a lot of the same features, just maybe not in as pretty of a package.  Given the open-source nature of the project there’s no doubt in my mind that many of the issues I have with the Android operating system will be worked out in time, and for an initial release Android and the G1 are looking pretty good.  I’m hoping that Google works on bringing an Android-enabled device to Verizon sometime soon, because who knows – I might just get my own Google Android phone in the future.

Now Playing:
Deftones – If Only Tonight We Could Sleep (The Cure cover)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

Is Google Chrome better than Firefox?

Like most people interested in the internet or just technology in general, I was very quick to download and try Google’s web browser, out in beta, called Chrome.  It came out last week after a comic introducing it to the public slipped a bit early, and since then it has garnered the at lot of attention from all of the usual suspects in the tech news community.  As a result I figured I’d go ahead and offer up my analysis.

So, as a browser, Chrome rocks.  It churns through pages faster than any of the alternatives (IE, Firefox, and even Safari) and offers up an extremely simple “out-of-your-way” interface that lets you get straight to work.  One of the first things I usually have to do after installing a web browser is re-work the toolbar so that it takes up as little screen real estate as possible, allowing what’s left to be dedicated to the actual pages I’m viewing.  When I installed Chrome I didn’t have to worry about that at all.  The toolbar, including page tabs, takes up around 5% of my vertical screen space, around half of what Firefox uses.  Not a bad start considering Google’s approach to Chrome was to introduce a browser that accentuated the pages and applications we use, not the browser itself.

As far as features go there’s definitely some interesting stuff going on.  The first feature you’ll notice when you try out Google Chrome is a bit of a revolution – new tabs that are actually useful.  In Firefox or Safari if you open a blank tab you get just that, a blank tab ready to go to whichever address you specify.  With Chrome you get a page that shows some tiles for pages you visit frequently – not just links.  So if I go to Kotaku a lot I’ll see a small snapshot on my new tab of Kotaku’s homepage (along with my other frequently-visited sites).  From there I can just click one of the tiles and away I go.  I wish that you could get a little bit larger preview of the website, but just being able to see everything at once is pretty handy.  From what I can tell the preview is live from the site, not cached, so if there’s new content on the page you’ll know.

Another one of the more obvious features is Incognito Mode.  By opening a new window in Incognito Mode you’re initiating activity that is entirely ignored by the history and cookies.  This poses a deep philosophical question I think – if a web browser pings google.com and there’s no history of the request, did it really ever happen?  All that aside this is a pretty cool feature, and I’m surprised it hasn’t worked its way into a web browser yet.  It should be said that you can replicate this sort of functionality using Firefox extensions, but having the feature native opens it up to much more general use I think.

I’m sure I missed a lot of features as I’ve only just begun using the browser, but I wanted to step into some more technical aspects of why Google Chrome is important.  Firstly, it makes each tab in your browser a separate node.  What that means is if one of your tabs crashes you don’t lose everything else, just that one tab.  As a blogger who has turned to WordPress’ browser editor for writing posts as of late I value this feature immensely.  There’s nothing worse than losing a bunch of work in one tab because something else got hung up on some chunk of Java that it couldn’t handle and, since a lot of the websites we use today are really individual web applications, it makes sense to integrate cross-tab stability.  After all, in the desktop environment it’s not acceptable anymore to have a system crash because your word processor died on you, is it?

Part of the reason that Google Chrome is so much faster than browsers before it has to do with the application threading.  In your more classic web browsers the application is single threaded.  So then, if a web page has some flash on it, some javascript, and of course some HTML you have to wait for each step of the thread to complete before you move on to the next.  Google Chrome is multi-threaded, with each thread designated to a certain function (a javascript thread which ONLY runs javascript, an HTML thread which ONLY renders HTML, etc).  This means that you don’t have to wait for the HTML to be rendered before you can move on to executing javascript on the page, and because there’s less waiting it makes sense that the pages load faster.

So then, I guess I have a lot of positive things to say about Google Chrome.  Still, there are some negatives.  First off the biggest reason I see for people not wanting to move to Chrome as their default browser is the lack of extensions.  I’m sort of guilty of the same.  For the most part I haven’t been a sucker for extensions, and found them to add somewhat trivial functionality to my browsing while simultaneously taking up more system resources and slowing things down.  Then I found the Remember the Milk extension for Gmail.  This extension is very simple and yet it has changed the way I’ve worked – all it does is add my task list next to my email.  Because a lot of my tasks come from email it’s made it easier to manage them as they come.  I think I would really miss that extension if I were to move to Chrome because it’s become almost integrated with Gmail to me at this point.  If I go to Gmail in Safari or Chrome my initial reaction is “Wait, where are my tasks?  Is something broken?” before realizing that’s a Firefox-only feature.  I’m sure given the nature of Google Chrome and the fact that it’s open source we’ll see extension eventually, but until then the lack there-of will keep at least some people away.

There’s also the “evil corporation” concern.  Google makes their money with advertising, right?  And if they have a browser whose address bar doubles as a search bar it wouldn’t take much for them to start monitoring your searches to better place ads.  It’s happened with Google search and even their web applications.  How long before they plant that sort of bug in Chrome?  Is it already there?  I’m not sure, like most people I didn’t read the EULA.  Still, the concern is always there.

Overall I’d say Google Chrome is, at very least, worth the download.  I’ve set it as the default browser on one of my windows machines and I have to say – lack of extension(s) aside – I’m liking it.  Plus it’s only a beta (given the track record of Google’s applications it could be for a very, very long time) so I’m sure there will be many improvements down the road.  I couldn’t have asked for a better offering with their first attempt.  For now Google Chrome is for Windows only, but they’ve assured us they’re working on Mac and Linux versions as well.

Now Playing:
Deftones – Cherry Waves
Crysis

Cuil.com – potential Google killer?

As I’m writing this post it seems as though the biggest web story today is the emergence of Cuil.  Cuil, which is a gaelic word pronounced “cool” that means knowledge, is a search engine.  Big deal, right?  There’s a ton of them.  What makes Cuil special is that it has been given life by former Google employees.  A little more interesting, right?  Despite there being some nice Google alternatives out there (I love ask.com’s interface) no one has been able to come close to toppling the search engine giant.

Cuil also has a larger search index than any competitor.  They boast three times as many pages as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft’s Live search.  Not only that but they rank websites differently than Google does – it’s completely based on keywords and the content that surrounds them and how it relates to the rest of the page.  If this method turns out to be effective it could put an abrupt stop to the quest for linkbacks or the need for some sites to link farm in order to get a higher ranking in Google.  Of course that completely assumes that Cuil would be able to overtake Google as the standard search engine which, let’s be honest, is a bit of a pipe dream at this point.

The last feature that Cuil has going for it is that it doesn’t harvest user information like Google does.  All searches are completely anonymous and result suggestions are based on the content viewed in the search instead of a user’s history.  That’s a pretty good idea and these days I don’t think anyone is turned off by a little more privacy online.  Again the site is definitely still to be proven, but it has a lot of ideas that could be huge if implemented properly.  We might finally be seeing the birth of a Google killer. 

There still are a couple of un-answered questions regarding Cuil though.  First of all, as I mentioned there’s already been so much time and money invested by many companies into SEO aimed at the Google model, what would happen to all of that if Cuil took the forefront?  If their content-related search rankings really work would content finally become king?  I’m kind of torn on this subject.  On the one hand as a user I’d love for better content to get higher ranks.  On the other hand it might make it more difficult for smaller sites to ever get noticed.  Then again, every system can be gamed eventually so that probably wouldn’t be as big of a concern in the end.

The next question is where does Cuil go from here?  In the beginning of this post I mentioned that they were getting a lot of buzz online, so much so that right now the search is unusable.  With Microsoft searching desperately for a company to help them make a play in the online search game plus the fact that Cuil is from former Google employees, I could see them being bought very quickly.  If not from Microsoft then maybe by one of their competitors as a defensive move.  I dunno, maybe I’m nuts but this seems like a no-brainer if you’re Microsoft.  They could pick up Cuil, leave Yahoo behind to fade away and start making progress in their mission to compete with Google.

All of that is just future speculation at this point, but I think it’d be worth your time to go check the site out and try running a few searches if the servers are functioning by the time this post goes up.  It has an interesting user interface and might just turn up some decent results for you!

Now Playing:
The Pogues – Streams of Whiskey