Best of 2009 Software technologies: Part2

 In this section, we will take a look at two of the most innovative of technologies to come from Google.
Google Wave

Email  is several decades old, says Google. It existed long before the web. It was designed for a different time. It is now time to reinvent the proverbial wheel.On this note, Google delivered the Wave, the email for the millenium. 

Part email, part chat, part collaboration tool, part digital white-board, Google Wave is a marvel. It provides an interface through which multiple parties can coordinate efforts on a common screen. For those of us trying to coordinate efforts on a project with email,Wave minimizes the overhead by giving every person on the team the ability to keep up with the newest status  with an ingenius playback mechanism to review the sequences of changes made to the wave after it was created..


A person who has newly joined a wave can easily bring herself up-to-date  by hitting the plgo mainstream ay button that shows her the sequence by which changes were made by other parties participating in the collaborative project.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to describing features of the wave. However, experience tells us that great technology by itself cannot make a ground breaking change. It remains to be seen how quickly this development would permeate our culture. Email, over the decades has become so ingrained in our habits, that we may not be able to give it up for a long time.


Is the Wave ahead of its time?Google wave is not proprietary to Google. Anyone can create applications that cater to handling waves. However, if the wave gets to be the accepted way of collaboration in the future, Google has the prime mover advantage.

Google Voice

When Google released the android, it sounded off a warning that it was marching into the mobile space.  Google voice left no further doubts about Google's intention of entering into the domain of mobile computing.(No pun intended on domain). A few months ago, the hype began when news was released that Google had bought a million phone numbers.

It was then realized that Google was onto an idea that would change the way we handle all our phones, lanline, work and mobile. I have covered  Google Voice in fair detail in a previous post. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to describing features of the wave. However, experience tells us that great technology by itself cannot sell itself, a sentiment explained today as the mousetrap fallacy.  It remains to be seen if these two technologies would become part of our daily life.

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Making sense of Google Voice

As mentioned in a recent Tweet, I just got my Google Voice account and I love it. Unfortunately, getting one is by special invitation from the other evil empire, Google. So what is Google voice?

It is an answering machine on steroids. A prerequisite for using Google voice is that you must have a Gmail account. Another prerequisite is that you must have atleast one phone(Mobile, LAN line or a workphone).

To begin with, you get your own phone number from Google. This will be your primary phone number which you will hand off to your contacts.

Many Phones, One number

By logging into your Google account and customize your Google voice. Let us assume you have a mobile phone, a LAN line and a work phone. Hopefully, you have all your contacts in your Google/gmail account. For each of your contacts, you can now decide which of your three phones to ring when that particular contact tries to call you using your Google Voice number.

Changing to a new phone number is painless and trivial

If ever, any of your three numbers(LAN, mobile or work) should change, simply log into Google voice and change the respective entry to the new number. Google voice will forward an incoming call to the new number/phone as long as you hand out your Google voice number to all your contacts as your main phone.

Your voice mail as email

One killer feature of Google Voice is its ability to transcribe your messages into text. This means that when someone leaves a message for you on Google voice, it is transcribed as text and shows up in your Gmail mailbox like any email message.

I experimented with this feature leaving a few messages for myself. The transcription process works reasonably well. It even tries to make some educated guesses when it cannot understand some words I use.


Your voice mail online

In addition to the transcribed message, your message is also available as an audio file that is playable from an embedded media player on your Google voice web page.


Unlimited Space

You will never have a full message box again. Messages are saved in your gmail account. As there is no limit on the size you your email message box, there is none on the size of your voice message box as well.

Integrated Interface
You have a choice. You can either use the Google voice interface or the gmail interface. Your choice. Each is intuitive and bear a striking similarity to the other.

Contact me when I am overseas
When I travel, I can still continue to get Google voice messages. I could check them whenever I have Internet access.

Its free!
Isn't this enough reason to get a Google voice account?

Do I have to hand out a new number to all my contacts now?
Google admits that it is a pain to replace your existing number but for now, there seems to be little they can do about this problem for now. There is some good news on the horizon, though. Google plans to give Google Voice users the ability to use an existing phone number that belongs to them as their Google voice number.

Google has permeated yet another facet of my life.

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