Jayeblog

I’m still midway through writing a monster-post about my preferences and sensibilities when it comes to coffeeshops—a topic that I think about and talk about more than anyone of sound mind should—but it might be another week or so before I’m finished with that. In the meantime, I want to talk about Google Voice.

Google Voice is the descendant of a product called GrandCentral, acquired by Google two years ago in July 2007. I heard about it in the spring, when they launched the beta and invited users to sign up for invitations. I did so, and finally got my invitation on Friday.

If you want the full scoop on the service and its features, you’ll need to listen to what Google says about it. In a nutshell, it’s a new web application that does to the communication data on your phones (phone calls, SMS, and voicemail) what Gmail does to your email: it makes volumes of data more manageable. It lets you search and sort these things, and keeps them all in chronological order. The ability to apply labels or tags isn’t available yet, but I’m positive it will be soon. Next July, I’ll be able to look back through my history in Google Voice and see all of the calls and text messages I was involved with today. Any call or SMS you place or receive through Voice (for free, of course, with the exception of international calls) is archived for you and made available for all of these sexy data management functions.

Why is that sexy? Because data is sexy. More specifically, organized data is sexy. There’s a lot of information in our lives—alot. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least seven major datasets I interact with on a daily basis: my music library, email archives, photo collection, calendar, contact information for my friends and family, financial transactions & records, to-do lists, and more. Those are all datasets for which I’ve already got a system of management in place. These systems range from simple to complex, virtual to neurological, contrived to intuitive. They’re not perfect systems, either. Some of my systems get revised on a monthly or even weekly basis, to account for new tools or new revelations about their datasets. But for each of them, the system exists to help me organize and get more use out of information. I could write an entire blog post about how and why I choose my data systems, and maybe someday I will.

Noticeably absent from that list is data about the phone and SMS conversations I have. And there’s no good reason for it! We exist in a digital age, and we use digital devices to have these conversations, yet our systems for tracking their data are rudimentary at best, carefully toeing the line between laughable and reprehensible. Why is this the case? No one will argue that there’s value in tracking this, certainly—for example, being able to sort through your call history and separate your work calls from personal calls could be quite useful. But until Google Voice came along, there was no way to track this or any other information related to the use of your phone.

There are at least a dozen other good reasons to use Google Voice—among them speech-to-text transcription of voicemail messages and the ability to set up routing rules on a per-group or per-contact basis—but this one reason above all others has been blowing my mind since I got my invite and began to explore this new product. Google has never been particularly good at helping people create information (although they make a habit of buying companies that are), but since the beginning, they’ve been the best in the world at helping people organize and make use of it. They do it with the web, with email, with news, and even with the geography. And now they’re doing it with our phone conversations, revolutionizing and democratizing one of the last great caches of unreachable data in our daily lives.

If you couldn’t tell already, I’m really excited about this.