Please no.
I only use one irreplaceable Google service. I can live without YouTube and there’s not a single other product I use from them…seriously. When they killed Latitude, I was pretty hurt because i used Latitude for life-tracking so I could see KMLs for where I had physically been the last 5 years…every moment of the day geo-tagged. I really liked that service. The same goes for the most recent news that FourSquare is turning into a recommendation engine for things to do and all check-ins must be done on Swarm now. Swarm is a step back from FourSquare’s application and it makes my activities far more public. I don’t want to use Swarm…I want to use FourSquare. I tried Swarm and I hate it.
For the past 6 months, Gizmodo has touted that the end is near for Google Voice and each time, they seem giddy about the whole concept. Calling people from Voice.google.com is too hard I guess so they prefer the technology exist within hangouts instead.
Why?
Everyone I know, even my parents don’t know my cell phone number. The reason is because I literally get a new number every year. My land-line and cell phone number change quite often because I simply don’t care about what number I currently have. Yes, I have a land-line, a cordless telephone in my house. when you spend 2 hours a day on conference calls, it’s quite nice to have a real phone. The clarity and latency of a land-line is great. Cell phones still suck at voice latency and call quality especially where I live…and that’s assuming you get reception at all which I haven’t at my last 3 homes here.
So Google Voice is great! When you call my 415 number, it rings my Macintosh, my mobile phone, my land-line and my desk phone at the office…simultaneously.
If I don’t like you, I can block you from ever calling me again with one click or simply mark your number as spam. If Blocked, you’ll get a disconnected sound, if spam, you can leave a message but my phones won’t ring. I can text (SMS) from my web browser! This is so cool. I hate typing on mobile devices. I HATE it. Typing with my thumbs is the most painful process in my life right now. It takes hours to write a sentence and I usually just give up and go over to my iMac. So texting is such a big deal with kids my age that I can text from my computer. AWESOME!
Finally, I don’t have to dial numbers. I click a number from an email and my land-line rings and I pick up and it connects to the number i want to dial.
Google Voice is great because:
- Phone Number portability
- Browser based SMS
- Block / Spam features
- Special Ring-tones
- Call Screening (If you’re not in my contacts / address book, you have to state your name and I can screen who it is before pressing 1 to talk to you)
- Listen in on voicemails…I can listen while you leave a voice mail and press a key to actually talk to you or not..up to me.
- Voicemail transcription
- Mobile applications for iOS and Android
It’s the greatest thing ever! Google Voice is something I’d pay $50 a year for.
Can you guys please stop calling the death of Google Voice and also stop telling Google that merging it with hangouts is a good idea? It’s not a good idea. Please don’t let this happen.
Just the fact that my friends and family will have to call me on 3 different telephone lines OR they call my cell phone number, I have no service, 4 hours later I get a voicemail or missed call notification, I have to then dial their number on my land-line. It’s terrible. Or they call my land-line and I’m not home. Or I have to actually listen to voicemails instead of having them transcribed automatically and dear God, I have to type SMS messages on my phone because 80% of the people I know don’t have iMessage?
This sounds like a living Hell.
Google, don’t change Voice. Please don’t. I’m begging you.