Enter Google Voice. I heard about this some months ago, but it never really struck me as useful. I’m highly suspicious of Google, despite their “Don’t be evil” tagline. There’s got to be some evil reason behind hording all of this data. Our emails? Texts? Websites? Now our voices and phone numbers? Oh that’s right, if you sync your contacts with Google Contacts they already have them. So for my personal line? Never! I have no desire to use Google Voice for this. Frankly, I don’t even trust the phone companies with my data, but this may be a necessary breech for now. But for business? Yes! Google Voice has great potential for the independent business person.

Google Voice comes in two tasty varieties: Use your own number or get a new one. If you use your own, your stuck. No additional number for you. If you choose the Red Pill, then you’ll get a new phone number that you can set to ring at any number of phones. It’ll get your voicemail when you don’t answer. It’ll even send your voicemail as text messages. That’s right. Rumor has it, voice to text. Don’t panic yet…

Features for using your own number

• Google voicemail: voicemail like email
• Voicemail transcription: read what your voicemail says
• Custom greetings: vary voicemail greetings by caller
• International calling: low cost calls to the world
• Notifications: read voicemail messages via email or SMS
• Share voicemails: forward, embed, or download voicemails

Features if you get a new Google number

• One number: a single phone number that rings all your phones
• Free SMS: send, receive & store text messages online
• Block calls: send unwanted callers straight to voicemail
• Record calls: record phone calls and store them online
• Conference calls: join several people into a single call
• Screen callers: hear who is calling before you pick up

Here are some videos to wet your appetite. If you have a Voice account, please send me an invite! I applied for an account last week. Now I’m just waiting… and waiting… hitting refresh on my email over and over. Nothing but emails from cute girls. Where are you Google Voice invitation?

Man is God.

He is everywhere, he is anybody, he knows everything.

This is the Prometeus new world.

All started with the Media Revolution, with Internet, at the end of the last century.

Everything related to the old media vanished: Gutenberg, the copyright, the radio, the television, the publicity.

The old world reacts: more restrictions for the copyright, new laws against non authorized copies. Napster, the music peer to peer company is sued.

At the same time, free internet radio appears; TIVO, the internet television, allows to avoid publicity; the Wall Street Journal goes on line; Google launches Google news.

Millions of people read daily the biggest on line newspaper. Ohmynews written by thousands of journalists; Flickr becomes the biggest repository in the history of photos, YouTube for movies.

The power of the masses.

A new figure emerges: the prosumer, a producer and a consumer of information. Anyone can be a prosumer.

The news channels become available on Internet.

The blogs become more influential than the old media.

The newspapers are released for free.

Wikipedia is the most complete encyclopedia ever.

In 2007 Life magazine closes.

The NYT sells its television and declares that the future is digital. BBC follows.

In the main cities of the world people are connected for free.

At the corners of the streets totems print pages from blogs and digital magazines.

The virtual worlds are common places on the Internet for millions of people.

A person can have multiple on line identities.

Second Life launches the vocal avatar.

The old media fight back.

A tax is added on any screen; newspapers, radios and televisions are financed by the State; illegal download from the web is punished with years of jail.

Around 2011 the tipping point is reached: the publicity investments are done on the Net. The electronic paper is a mass product: anyone can read anything on plastic paper.

In 2015 newspapers and broadcasting television disappear, digital terrestrial is abandoned, the radio goes on the Internet.

The media arena is less and less populated. Only the Tyrannosaurus Rex survives. The Net includes and unifies all the content. Google buys Microsoft. Amazon buys Yahoo! and become the world universal content

leaders with BBC, CNN and CCTV.

The concept of static information – books, articles, images – changes and is transformed into knowledge flow.

The publicity is chosen by the content creators, by the authors and becomes information, comparison, experience.

In 2020 Lawrence Lessig, the author of ‘Free Culture’, is the new US Secretary of Justice and declares the copyright illegal.

Devices that replicate the five senses are available in the virtual worlds. The reality could be replicated in Second Life.

Any one has an Agav (agent-avatar) that finds information, people, places in the virtual worlds.

In 2022 Google launches Prometeus, the Agav standard interface.

Amazon creates Place, a company that replicates reality. You can be on Mars, at the battle of Waterloo, at the Super Bowl as a person. It’s real.

In 2027 Second Life evolves into Spirit. People become who they want.

And share the memory. The experiences. The feelings. Memory selling becomes a normal trading.

In 2050 Prometeus buys Place and Spirit. Virtual life is the biggest market on the planet. Prometeus finances all the space missions to find new worlds for its customers: the terrestrial avatar.

Experience is the new reality.

Voice: Philip K. Dick Avatar.
Date: 6th April 2051

I finally got one, thanks to Joe Franks, developer genius and all-around good guy. Just to give you a timeframe of what all of this is about–he sent my request two weeks ago. I got it last night.

This morning, after a round of emails about an iPhone app from my bed, and after my first round of too many morning coffees, I finally was able to log in. Here’s what I saw:

At first glance, you will immediately see that I have no one to actually communicate with except Joe. And Joe doesn’t typically wake up until after lunch. Since he’s on CST and I’m in NY, that leaves us about 3 solid hours to Wave at each other during the day. But we won’t because we already chat through AIM. Furthermore, we just don’t chat that much unless we’re collaborating on a project or he’s trying to get me to migrate off of his server.

I tried adding some of my other friends under Contacts, but Google said they didn’t have Wave accounts. Ok, that makes sense. But when I tried adding a few colleagues from work who share the same Google Apps account, success! Wave allowed me to add them. Their photos showed up and everything. But… they never received an email notifying them of anything. Here I am the loneliest Waver. Or, perhaps, everyone on Wave right now feels the way I do.

Here’s another screenshot for your edification, since that’s pretty much all you can do with Wave right now–take screenshots of it:

This week Google announced that it would be inviting 100,000 people to test drive the new Wave platform. When I found out about this exciting new technology about three months ago, I instantly signed up to try it out. This video will probably help explain why.

If you have a Wave account and an extra invite, I would be really, really, really, really, really, really, really thankful if you would think to send it to me. dhaddock at storycorps.org. I have been pining for this to come out for several months, and although I don’t like that video very much, it’s clear to me that this is going to be a very powerful platform for communication. Here are the two main reasons I think so. Maybe this will make you want to invite me:

Communication: Right now the two best mediums for collaborating on a project in real time are in person, on the phone, email and chat. In-person communication is my favorite, because despite my IT profession, I’m really a people-person. A personable person. A purple people eater. On the phone is a nice substitute, but it’s always awkward when people end up pausing or talking over each other. Email is really good because it can be direct, and there is time to think before responding. Chat’s probably the most difficult because it’s the closest thing to a phone conversation, but minus the inflections of voice, not in the very least confusing during moments of sarcasm, right?

Google Wave seems to have many features that are focused on sharing information amongst fellow Wavers. For instance, there are already extensions available for SalesForce, Google Maps, Lonely Planet, and more. (See this page.) Sure, we can use Wave for a friendly chat or playing a game together, but these extensions refocus the medium on sharing information. Wave seems to combine the best aspects of email and chat, allowing me to pass links and otherwise share things with collaborators, supplementing message with actual data. No more pasting 250 character urls in a chat window, maybe? No longer wondering if the url I pasted in that email will work.

Collaboration: As IT manager, it’s highly inefficient for me to meet with my team. We do meet, of course, for weekly check-ins, but outside of that I’m planning for the next steps, filling in gaps, and meeting with other departments and our directors to orient our technological infrastructure with our goals and budget. It’s wizard’s work, to be honest. I love it. Basically we communicate like this: if we don’t need a fast response–email. If we do need a fast response, we either chat or get up and walk to someone’s desk.

But how awesome would it be to have my entire team on the same chat-like platform, sharing links and picking up and putting down the conversation as we work in the background? Say I’m working with an intern to develop a PHP script for our SugarCRM site. We could be chatting about the script while at the same time collaborating on the code. Now that can be extremely powerful. Wave is another feather in the cap of distributed programming, and also any other type of distributed project that requires multiple inputs. How cool would it be to work in real time with our development department contributing to tech grant language as they write the meat of the text?

So, if you have a Google Wave invite available, I’d absolutely love you for sharing it with me. I realize the platform will be available to the public soon, but I want to get my hands on it now to see if it can really do everything I think it can. I’m also familiar with several of the Google APIs, and I’d like to explore the extensions.

Thanks! I promise I won’t break it!