ma bell redux

Got a response from Jane Pierce about the google phone thing, and wound up writing a rather lengthy and excited reply about this new-found toy. Here 'tis...

Actually, the service was developed as a way to centralize a person's various telephone numbers--home, cell, work, pager, whatever. You can either get a new google voice number, as I did, or port a number you already own into google's system. The magic trick is that you can then connect all of your various phones to your google voice account (you do this online, and there's a process of confirming that you really do control a given phone number), after which you can give out just that one number, and when someone calls it, it rings all of your phones, and you can answer on any of them.

Or you can set it up to ring different numbers at different times of day, or according to who is calling, or you can have a particular caller always go straight to voicemail, or whatever. So maybe your immediate family rings all your phones, while work acquaintances only ring to your work phone. And you can check the voicemail on your computer, listen live while someone is leaving a message, and even answer the call on your computer while they're leaving a message if it turns out to be important, just like the good old fashioned answering machine.

I'm kind of wishing I had known about this before, because over the past year or so I've saved maybe eight or ten voicemail messages that Carrie left me with Siri--the oldest has her just barely beginning to talk, then later messages gradually become more clear, and she's saying things like, "Love you Papa," and "Hiiii!" They're completely adorable, and I want to keep them forever, but I couldn't find any way to get them out of Verizon's voicemail system. I had to play them and re-save them every week or two because verizon will delete any message more than three weeks old, and when I came to the Bush I knew I wouldn't have any cel service, so I wouldn't be able to do the little saving game any more. The only thing I figured out to do was play the messages on my phone and record them with the chincy little microphone on my laptop; I did it in Anchorage the night before I flew out here. This dramatically reduced the already shoddy sound quality, but at least I still have them. If I'd had google voice right along, not only would I have been able to keep them as long as I wanted, I could also could have downloaded them in reasonably good quality, and even shared them with other people via the handy email link in the message folder.

The introduction video I watched said they started out by thinking, what if the telephone were reinvented right now, what would it be like? Seems like they came up with an awfully good answer. Hell of a cool service. Hmmmm, I think I'll post this little blurb to my blog. :)