Google Voice Daily

Today this site becomes Google Voice Daily, or gvDaily for short. The URL is gvDaily.com. See here for information about the author and contributors.

Our goal is for gvDaily to be the indispensable blog for news, opinion and speculation about Google Voice. gvDaily will have the latest news and information about Google Voice, including pointers to breaking news, rumors we learn of ourselves and from others, and of course opinion.

gvDaily will be informed by our unique perspective as authors of the upcoming Google Voice For Dummies, to be published in November, and early users of GrandCentral and Google Voice itself. Also by many years of experience in technology, including work for Apple, IBM and Microsoft, service at AltaVista when it was flying high and when Google was crushing it, writing the early PC telecommunications book On-Line with BitCom, and much more.

Along with beginning the book, we also founded this blog, as GetGoogleVoice, to support it. Now we think the blog deserves more of our attention, so are making a greater commitment of time and energy to it, and renaming it gvDaily.

We spotted the potential of Google Voice literally the day it was announced. The potential, that is, for Google Voice to serve as a new, useful tool that would make a difference in the daily lives of, potentially, millions of people. (And save them, potentially, many millions of dollars.) As experienced authors, we were able to quickly get Wiley enthused about the idea of doing a book. Our support from them has been tremendous.

More recently, things started to get a little strange. Over the last few weeks we were excited by the rollout of third party dialers for Google Voice on several platforms, particularly the iPhone. We were even more thrilled by Google’s new Android and BlackBerry dialers, especially the thorough-going integration of Google Voice into Android. This seemed to us to be “the way forward”, as the Brits put it. We hoped the “first-party” iPhone app from Google would be as close to the Android dialer as possible.

Then, this past week, things truly went nuts. Apple not only rejected Google’s app but – the true sin, in our mind – squashed the already-approved apps GV Mobile, VoiceCentral and gvDialer. Big companies who treat their developers this way usually pay a price, sooner or later. Apple, after many months of complaints about its handling of the App Store, started to pay that price. News and critical opinion exploded, and a few influential users and developers deserted the iPhone, largely for Android.

On Friday, the other shoe dropped. The Federal Communications Commission wrote three letters, one each to Apple, AT&T and Google (see next story, above). The letters ask for details on the Google Voice apps decision and on how the App Store works, on AT&T’s influence on the App Store, and on how the Android Market works, respectively.

From here on, events – legal and political as well as business and technical – will be very hard to keep track of. You may find yourself wondering – we hope on a daily basis, or nearly so – what’s happening with Google Voice, and what does it all mean?

Not only will events proliferate, the broad trends are important. No one involved in computing or communications can ignore Google Voice any longer. It’s not only a breakthrough technology in its own right, it’s a canary in several different coal mines. Google Voice is both buffeted by, and benefiting from, many of the most important trends affecting all of technology today.

There’s clearly a need for a single source of information and opinion on Google Voice, a clearinghouse run by people whose only interest is in seeing Google Voice meet the greatest range of needs for the greatest number of people possible; a source without financial or personal ties to any of the principals.

gvDaily is that source. We are uniquely well-informed, having delved deeply into first GrandCentral and now Google Voice very early, so as to be able to write about this crucial technology for a general audience. And we’re uniquely well-placed to follow all the trends affecting Google Voice, and to let you know how they’ll affect you – now and in the future.

Follow the action along with us; we can all root for ourselves, as consumers and business decision-makers, to be the winners.

Google has started sending out invitations to Google Voice to people beyond the long-time GrandCentral user base. People who requested an invitation from Google are gradually receiving them.

Google also started warning GrandCentral users who haven’t made the move yet that it’s about time to upgrade. (The harsh expression we used in Silicon Valley back in the day was “get on the train or die”.)

GrandCentral founder and Google Voice product manager Craig Walker tweets that it will take “a little bit” to work through the backlog of requests, but at least the process has started.

However, there’s a subtle dilemma here for those who want to do more than just experiment with Google Voice. If you join today, you’ll be given a chance to choose a new number. The Google Voice sign-up process even helps you enter words and see if any available phone numbers match them.

But if you wait you may get a chance to start your time on Google Voice by porting an existing number, such as your cell phone number, to Google Voice. (This is called “inbound phone number portability”.) You may have to pay a penalty to your service provider, and you’ll have to get a new number for your actual cell phone to run on. But you won’t have to re-educate all the people who have your cell phone number to use your Google Voice number instead.

Or, I should say, try to re-educate them. Many people will “not get the memo” and keep calling your cell phone directly. And regardless, you still have to educate people who have your home phone number, and potentially your work phone number as well, to use your new Google Voice number instead.

Google Voice will save some of us so much money on long-distance calls, especially if you make them from a cell phone, that there’s no choice; you need to start using Google Voice as soon as possible. For the rest of us, though, it’s a dilemma. Will you stay on your current setup until you can use inbound phone number portability – or will you go to Google Voice right away?

PS Thanks to Paul for the correction to Craig Walker’s title and role.

For as much as I’m in awe of the cleverness of GrandCentral, there’s one breakthrough feature that wooed me more than any other — and then broke my tech-loving heart when it stopped working: in-call recording.

As a journalist, I conduct interviews every day; it used to be that if I wanted to record a call, I need to put a pickup earphone in my ear and connect it to a digital voice recorder. That solution worked well enough, but when it didn’t, chaos. Interviewing a top executive of Dell two weeks ago, the recorder inexplicably beeped itself into standby, leaving me scrambling to take hand-written notes about Dell’s intricate (and painfully specific) evironmental policies. Not cool.

That’s why GrandCentral’s call recording seemed like such a boon; unlimited call recording at the simple push of a button. It works like this: push the four key during a call, and there’s an announcement to both parties that the call is being logged. After that, it shows up in your Web voice mailbox just like a voicemail, where you can listen to it from anywhere.

Except that you can’t. For the first few weeks I used call recording, it worked nicely. Then it stopped shunting the recordings to my mailbox, even though the “recording” announcement came through on the line. Then pressing the four key stopped initiating recording at all.

At first I thought it was the fault of my iPhone — damned touch-keys and their illusions — but then I tried it on BlackBerry, Motorola, and Nokia devices to no avail. I went back to using my digital voice recorder, and I take fewer calls on GrandCentral because I can’t record them.

When Google decided to update GrandCentral to a Google-branded product, it made a tacit promise to GrandCentral users: that the product would function with Google-grade efficacy and reliability. I haven’t yet upgraded to Google Voice from GrandCentral, but when I do, I’ll be able to see if Google audited the site’s functionalty before slapping a new name on it — or whether the change was purely re-branding. Let’s hope it’s the former.