by mark on January 8, 2010
Ten years ago I bought a personal 800 number. Then I forwarded the number to wherever I was – cell phone, office, home. It worked pretty well, provided I didn’t screw up and leave the forwarding to the wrong number. Voice mail was a bit of an issue too.
You’d think in the intervening ten years someone would have come up with a solution to the issue of having three numbers on your business card and three disjointed voicemail systems, but there’s nothing widespread. Now Google has.
I’ve been using Google Voice for close to six months now. Here’s what it’s like. Someone calls your Google Voice number. All the phones you’ve set up ring simultaneously. You pick one of them up and you get told the name of the person calling. You have choice of answering, sending to voicemail, or sending to voicemail while you listen. Voicemails get transcribed to text and sent to your email and SMS. Plus everything shows up on the Google Voice website which is set up like Gmail.
There are some other cool features. SMS is the same way – comes to your phone and shows up on the website. You can SMS by typing on the website (easier than a cellphone) and the history shows up on the website. Want to make an outbound call? You can pick the number out of your address book and tell Google Voice which phone to use. Press the button, the phone rings, and you’re connected to the person your calling.
Want more? Check out the widget on this website. You can use it to call me right now. You can set the times different phones ring…set different greetings…go crazy. It’s free. It doesn’t seem to be rolled out to everyone yet, so if you want a pass, email me. Google may rule the world.
by mark on September 28, 2009
My new sig
OK interconnected world, I’ve got a couple cool new tools. First, let’s start with a social signature. How many emails do you send each day? If you’re like me, it’s a lot. Why not use that as a way to link back to your social networking sites, blog and twitter updates?
WiseStamp does a great job at this. As you can see from the image at the top, my sig includes links back to my main social networks as well as the latest blog entry. WiseStamp lets you you add a personalized signature on any webmail service such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL mail, and Hotmail. The main feature is the ability to add icons and links to profiles on most of the popular social networks and instant messenger services. This allows you to create dynamic Internet-ready signatures that connect to all of your online accounts. The ability to connect signatures to social network profiles is an excellent addition to our email experience. WiseStamp is a FireFox extension. Additional features are that you can configure both a personal and a business signature.
Next up is a little trick that I will give credit to my buddy Brad Pendergraph, social media evangelist extraordinaire. How about if you could give out a URL that easily connected the recipient with your main social presence? Does is sound compelling? It is. For instance if you click on NetworkWithMark.com it takes you to the about page of my blog where many of my main social links are listed. Typing ILikeMark.com into your browser takes you to my Facebook page. Cool huh? It makes an impact when you give it out. Brad says it isn’t his original idea, but the Internet is pay it forward medium. So now I’ve given the tip to you. Put it to work for $10 a year and a simple redirect.
