isnoop.net blog

Google Voice is a very interesting service. If you were one of the people (like myself) that got an account on GrandCentral.com before they were bought out by Google, you are now eligible to be part of the Google Voice beta.

It offers a lot of interesting services such as visual voicemail, speech to text, VOIP, free long distance, and many others. However, in order use most of these, you need to use the phone number Google assigns you. Google can’t be your voicemail provider unless all of your calls are routed through them first.

So are you going to hide your current cell phone number and tell all of your friends and family to call your GV number instead? Unlikely.
I believe it is much more likely that Google is actually moving to become a telephone service provider themselves. That way, you just transfer your phone number to Google and they give you all of the great features of GV along with it. However, in order to participate in LNP (the FCC program that enables users to transfer phone numbers between providers), they must become a wireless carrier.

I know it sounds unbelievable. I am somewhat skeptical myself. It seems like quite a stretch for them to actually get into voice service. After all, couldn’t Google just partner closely with the existing providers and integrate their GV directly into your existing plan? Unfortunately, cellular service providers would probably never play ball with Google this way. GV bundles free long distance VOIP, SMS, and (quite possibly) unlimited airtime.

Many people were skeptical when a search engine company was rumored to be branching into email. There was even more surprise as the rumors of a Google phone came true. Now that they have their own cell phone OS and a fantastic web integration platform, it is not inconceivable that they will take the next step and start leasing tower space.

Google is out to eat the telco’s lunch.

Google Voice is the long awaited re-release of Grand Central, an online voice communications service. Based on their beta, Google Voice will essentially be a Gmail for voicemails with call forwarding, filtering, SMS, VOIP, and speech to text.

They appear to be assigning Montana area code (406) phone numbers to folks who call or SMS a Google Voice user. I can only assume that the generated number will be your default Google Voice number if you eventually sign up.

If you would like to know your default Google Voice number, send an SMS to 206.855.5330. I’ll reply back to you with your number. Once established, you can start receiving calls at that number that are forwarded to your phone.

Disclaimer: I don’t know if the numbers are permanent, but they appear to keep working after at least two weeks.

A co-worker just pointed out a wonderful new tool for those who are frequently bothered by people who would rather ask you question instead of Googling it themselves:

LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com

Aside from being snarky and satisfying, it immediately struck me as a brilliant money maker. Perhaps even the best Google AdSense for Search referral generating tool since Mozilla put the Google search bar in every broswer it ships (Mozilla pulled down 75 million USD last year from your searches).

So, next time your cousin wants to know all about mesothelioma, send your response by way of LMGTFY and know that those guys are probably making a good chunk of the $40-$60 CPC the keyword “mesothelioma” commands.

Of course, I am in no way affiliated with LMGTFY. If they aren’t using their site as a Google search revenue generator, they’re missing out.

Update:
I’ve delved into their code and it would seem that they aren’t currently monetizing their searches. Perhaps it is better this way because it might break Google TOS to have their current gag auto-submit the search on behalf of the user.

Still, if you arrived on this page after searching for mesothelioma, I have my own ads that I use to help cover the cost of this and all my other sites. Just sayin’…

Update 2:
Good for them! The site is now sponsored by 37 Signals and they are bouncing traffic through Google AdSense for Search. Unfortunately, the referral version of the search results does not have the pretty look that traditional search results do. However, this does not degrade from the original thrust of the site which is to teach people that they, too, can use the Google.

My Google maps making, RSS feed slinging, universal package tracker has moved to greener pastures. Boxoh.com is your new go-to place for tracking UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, and Airborne packages.

Backstory: In 2006, I posted a handy new utility I’d cobbled together which was a mashup between package tracking for for multiple services. It quickly became by far the most popular page on this site, with more than 1.4 million tracking requests last month. It gets more than three times the traffic of my movie theater RSS generator and four times the traffic of another spinoff site, FeedSifter, a simple RSS/Atom feed filter.

If you are familiar with MediaTemple’s GridServer service, you’ll know that using up all 1000 GPUs (server work units) for the past several months is not a good thing. Those cycles weren’t just going to waste on poorly written scripts, either. Each hit to the tracker consumed an average of 0.0002 GPU (WordPress uses 8 to 16 times that with each hit). It wasn’t always this way, though. Check back soon for an upcoming post on how I managed to cut down the CPU usage of the package tracker by 90% with some intelligent code analysis and a creative caching solution.

Boxoh.com is now hosted on a screaming VPS server with plenty of spare power. I’m taking full advantage of APC caching and several other behind-the-scenes tweaks one can only get a grip on when they are running a dedicated server.

Thanks to all of the people who have made the service so popular!

Also, thanks to Juplex for a fast and friendly site design!

Search Google for real estate. As of a recent Google update, you should see Google’s newest search integration feature. (If not, try refreshing. This appears to be in a testing phase right now.)

This new feature seems to go head-to-head with the most basic of features (mapping properties for sale) offered by real estate mapping guru site zillow.com and to a lesser degree redfin.com.