Nels Wadycki

Gina “Lifehacker” Trapani wrote a post about Google Voice on SmarterWare in which she says:

Now that Google Voice supports SMS, you can send and receive text messages from your GV number as well, which is the last piece I needed to finally tell all my friends and family, “Here’s my new phone number.”

She’s been using GrandCentral since it came out, and only decided to switch completely with the addition of SMS. I’m pretty sure that when I get my iPhone (cross your fingers – any day now) I’ll just tell all my friends to send their text messages to my email address. Of course, then I’ll have to make sure to keep it less than 140 characters when I write them back, but at least I won’t have to give AT&T my wife’s arm and leg to pay for a text messaging plan.

Nels Gmail, Google Google Voice, iPhone, Lifehacker, SmarterWare

According to TechCrunch, Hulu gained 10 million viewers in Feburary, which is an impressive number, but if you look at their chart, what I think is more impressive is the 64.5 minutes per viewer which is second in the top 10 behind only Google Sites (aka YouTube) which had 134 minutes, and 3.6 times more than the next highest average minutes per viewer in the top 10.

Maybe it’s because Hulu rocks the house. I wish CBS and ABC would take note. I would give them more advertising revenue that they are otherwise losing because I’d be all over the past 4 seasons of How I Met Your Mother and the last few episodes of LOST that I haven’t been able to watch yet (and I might even watch Wipeout if I could add it to my Hulu queue).

Nels Google, TV ABC, CBS, Google, How I Met Your Mother, Hulu, LOST, NBC, TechCrunch, TV, YouTube

or: All Your Inbox Are Belong To Us

So, there’s a thing called Google Voice (via TechCrunch). And to quote TechCrunch:

Google also says that full integration with Gmail is coming, but won’t say when. Personally, having all my email, SMS and transcribed voicemails in a single inbox could be life-changing.

Yes indeed. Of course, this post has been skulking around in the background for almost a week, and so I’ve developed a counter-point as well, but let’s start with the positive.

Google Voice is a Google Product, so it has a pretty good chance of being awesome. Being a Google Product, it also has a pretty good chance of sucking, and pretty much no chance of being in between. But since TechCrunch says it’s Very Very Good, then I think the chances of being awesome are pretty good.

As someone who does not have a “smartphone” I would like a phone number that could direct my calls to my home number if I didn’t really want to deal with them, and deliver them to my cell phone if they were important. Of course, since it usually takes 24 hours or more for me to remember to set my cell phone back to Loud after I have to put it on Silent (like for a movie), the announcement of voicemails and SMS in my Gmail seems like a brilliant idea. I also like the idea of getting transcriptions of my voicemails and perhaps even moreso, the ability to save my text messages forever. Storing them in a place where I keep emails that I want to save forever is like getting fouled on a monster dunk.

Of course, if it could also tell me if a SMS message went to anyone else (like, say, and email does), then I would be 100% happy (as opposed to, you know, 99.999%), like getting fouled on a dunk from the three-point line, NBA Jam-style.

I already saw that at least one of my Facebook friends has upgraded from GrandCentral to Google Voice. Lucky b-tard. I don’t even remember hearing of GrandCentral before, but I wish I was part of the in crowd now. If you’re like me, you can find a link here that will give you a form to sign up to be notified when Google Voice is available to everyone.

Here’s the official Google Blog post which doesn’t have much besides a link to the Google Voice About Page. The About Page has a video for every feature (I believe) in the product, though, so that’s pretty awesome.

Nels Gmail, Google Gmail, Google, Google Voice, TechCrunch

Since Google’s FriendConnect now has public APIs and Joost de Valk (is that his real name?) already has a WordPress plugin, it seems like only a matter of minutes days until Disqus will add the ability to login through Google to their plugin.

(Would it help if I said Please?)

Nels Google Disqus, Google, Google Friend Connect

This time-saving tip to set your email signature to say it was sent from your mobile device is one of the best things I’ve heard in a while. The way you save time with that is to just write short responses to emails, and since it’s “sent” from your iPhone or Blackberry or whatever, it’s socially acceptable for you to be brief.

And with all the time you save, you can build an office out of cardboard and draw all over it!

Nels Getting Things Done, Misc Tech, Productivity Getting Things Done, Productivity

Of course, Read/WriteWeb compares it to Twitter rather than, say, Yahoo Answers (which is the first product that I would think to compare it to).

Whatever comparison you make, though, Aardvark sounds pretty cool. (Too bad the URL www.aardvark.com was already taken, leaving them with the awkward vark.com)

Basically, what Aardvark does (or will do, when it’s out of beta) is allow you to send questions to your instant messaging client (provided that you use Gmail, AIM, or MSN Live Messenger) and get answers back.

In the RWW post there is another picture with a real demonstration of an Aardvark user looking for book recommendations for someone who likes Neal Stephenson. As someone who likes Neal Stephenson, this is a great example (and I’m sure it was chosen since it would appeal to tech geeks who tend to be Stephenson’s usual audience). Again, as someone who likes Stephenson, and related authors, I can say that the recommendations given by the Aardvark responses were really very good.

RWW had 25 beta invites, but those are gone now. I’ve signed up to get my own, so I’ll just have to wait and see.

Nels Uncategorized