Google Voice is still Lacking
I’ve been a religious Google Voice user for awhile now, so it really bothers me that it is still lacking feature wise. Of course, I’ve been helping with some of these missing features (re: Google Voice for Outlook) but there are still plenty more missing as well as some minor issues I have with the service.
Multimedia Messaging (MMS)
For some reason, Google Voice still lacks this functionality. It can’t be THAT difficult, can it? I mean, the iPhone managed to add it before Google Voice, and if you really want to compete in the mobile business, its kind of necessary to have MMS, as SMS is pretty much irrelevant now.
Not only that, but any MMS that is sent to a Google Voice number is just lost. Couldn’t they at least be forwarded to my email address? I don’t like the fact that I could be losing incoming messages to /dev/null, and its even more annoying having to give out two different phone numbers (one for MMS and one for SMS).
Shortcodes
It is all well and good that Google’s own shortcodes work through Google Voice, but not so fantastic that nobody else’s does. I don’t want to be passing around two sets of phone numbers, and I’d love the ability to just set to spam a shortcode that is getting out of hand and won’t let me unsubscribe (if that ever happens). Developers pay tons of money to set up shortcodes, so why doesn’t Google Voice support them?
API
Google Voice is a Service. I use it with my cell, with my home phone, and with my computer. But in order to make desktop apps or things like Google Voice for Outlook possible, an API is almost necessary. I’ve managed to do it without one, but it still pretty much sucks.
Outlook Mobile Service
Companies charge tons of money for people to have the ability to send text messages through Microsoft Outlook. Adding the very simplistic SOAP server to the Google Voice backend would allow anyone with Microsoft Office to send text messages, forward emails, and receive reminders and notifications for FREE, something that is usually charged 10 cents or more per message. (Combine this with MMS as mentioned above, and it gets EVEN BETTER!)
Internet Fax Service
Google Voice already has “Receive Faxes” as a “Suggest a Feature.” Adding this and providing users on computers a way to send faxes would increase productivity and make the service even more useful to small companies and freelancers.
Keep in mind, these are just a few ways that Google could improve Google Voice, there are tons more.
What do you want to see added?
Somebody loves Google Voice Outlook Mobile Service~ ♥
BareBones Networking (Picture is linked) wanted to use my Google Voice OMS Code, so I took all day customizing the code and getting it working on his server, I’m proud to announce that he is willing to allow public use (please be reasonable with it though, please?) So head on over to the BareBones Networking OMS page, type in your GMail Login, click Setup, and follow Outlook (2007 or 2010)’s Instructions and you’ll be ready to send Text Messages FOR FREE through Microsoft Outlook.
I’ll set up a landing page/site soon that gives the whole setup experience a pretty web interface too (maybe with FAQ for the technically challenged).
Enjoy =)
Dear Chrome: What the Hell is This?
I love that you finally added previews for each of your tabs, that amazing Windows 7 feature that all of your competitors adopted before you…
But what the light is this? Why on earth are there this mini-windows, and why are the preview windows themselves so faded out? Not to mention it doesn’t even WORK when you have Chrome minimized…
I love you Chrome, but you need to fix these in the next dev release. NEED.
Sneaky Twitter, or My Imagination?
Fairly surprisingly, twitter went down today (for what appeared to be no rhyme or reason), but something much more surprising happened when it did. A tweet I posted (from my own, self-coded twitter client that has no “store tweets until twitter is back up” system) was there on the site when it came back up (viewable in the image above).
I’m not entirely sure if this is what I want to think it is, but could it be that twitter has a secondary service that stores tweets that come in via the API until the system is back up, or something? I didn’t think the update had posted at all, as the API didn’t return any of the proper data (nor an error).
So, is this just a coincidence, or does twitter have a system in store to keep the stream flowing even when its not?
Portal 2 Scans (Leak)
The article from GameInformer magazine on the upcoming Valve title “Portal 2” have been leaked to the internet. I’ve provided their links here for your enjoyment.
TwCLI
So, you think you’ve had a lot of fun with twitter on the web and all those twitter clients you’ve played around with? What if I told you that you haven’t seen anything yet? What if I told you that you could use Twitter in a TRUE Command Line Interface with specific commands for interacting with twitter.
Welcome to one of my latest and greatest creations, TwCLI.
TwCLI supports almost everything twitter has to offer, and will soon be expanding to support even more! 
TwCLI includes a long list of commands, help information for each command, a theme-able interface (Specify a Pre-Determined theme, import from your twitter profile, or even specify an external CSS file!), Geo-Location, Retweets, and even Contributor Support!
Go ahead, give it a try and tell me what you think!
Geosense – I’m in Love
I love applications that fill in where hardware fails, but this one is really taking the cake! Geosense for Windows gives you the capabilities of a GPS sensor in your computer (but without the actual hardware!) It uses Google Location Services to triangulate your location and provide your coordinates to applications that request them.
Unfortunately, not many applications use this type of data (yet) but Long Zheng and Rafael Rivera are hoping that with this new default driver for PCs without GPS, that many more developers will embrace the creation of geo-location in desktop applications.
Continue Reading for Code Snippets
Rumor: Twitter Close to Unveiling Contributions
Do I know for sure? Absolutely not. Do I have inside information? Absolutely not. Was I randomly observant one night and saw something that seemed to push me to think in this direction? Yes.
Back in December, Twitter blogged about its “feature test with businesses” of a new Contribution API they were adding in to Twitter. One that would allow companies to give users permission to tweet on behalf of the main account, and still attribute that post to the user who wrote it.
If you wanted to see this in action, all you would have to do is look at the main Twitter account, where almost every post and retweet is attributed to one of the employees.
They originally announced that this feature would improve usage of applications like @CoTweet and @HootSuite. But if you look at their timelines, you see very little Contribution API dabble – until recently, that is.
Looking through CoTweet’s posts all the way back through December, none of them have contribution metadata – except for the latest two on February 18th and 19th. HootSuite has only one, posted on February 18th (none earlier, and none later). This brings to mind: Twitter must have recently been rolling out (or testing) their Contribution Feature – or are we really supposed to expect this to be coincidence?
And all of this with the Twitter Developer Meetup Scheduled for Monday, March 1st 2009.
All I’m saying is, I think they’ve gotten much closer to rolling out Contributions. Maybe they’ll announce it at this small developer meetup, since everybody already knows about it. Then again, maybe they won’t.