Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Google Voice - So... What New?

Google Announced officially the release of Google Voice.
Besides all market posts and mass comments, the set of new or innovative Voice Features so far are empty. They are just trying to move backwards in time when talking about obsolete and non simple features.
I honestly was expecting much more than a service binded to a real mobile number attached to a formal operator.
In a time that everybody is questioning the meaning of a phone number in the "post email ERA", Google came and released a service based on operator number.
When it might be a short term boom, but as other examples, this might achieve some success not for an innovative concept, but based on Google fame. Google fans probably will use it just to be recognized as early-adopters.
Where is the Interoperability? The Extensibility? The Open Service API? It seems like some basic principles of new Internet where forgotten somewhere under operators shoes.

In short words: "Google Voice does basically what your phone and your operator together always did."

If you are really looking for something that your phone never did before, try Nimbuzz Mobile and feel the real sensation of doing something that your phone never have done before.

Nimbuzz will show you that a "phone number" is the last thing in the world that you need in a full communicator solution.

Nimbuzz uses XMPP and Jingle in order to provide the biggest and feature rich mobile platform ever.

4 comments:

  1. What's the business model of Nimbuzz?

    I mean the app truly looks nice.

    But I would rather pay a few bucks, than having everything going by your servers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, I'm not up the business model.
    But I like the idea of having everything passing through the servers, as this is an awesome pressure in order to have an open XMPP network for MSN, Yahoo, etc...
    The fact that these protocols are not standard and each monopoly IM company has their own protocol stack, makes close to impossible make a mobile application with reasonable battery, specially if you need to connect to 8 different networks using 8 different protocols. This is a reality.
    Once IM networks finally migrate to XMPP, I believe you won't have to setup that many gateway accounts passing through a server. But this depends on how final users will pressure Closed Proprietary IM to speed up their migration.

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  3. It might be a nice idea, but it did not work at all for me.

    1.) The link send via SMS points to a URL containing something with "windows" in it, and leads to a site I am told I'm not allowed to enter (using Android).

    2.) Although my contact list is (obviously empty), the "contact list" on the website loads forever. (Firefox 3.0.11 on Kubuntu 9.04).

    3.) I cannot find any means to have my account removed. :-(

    ReplyDelete
  4. @stefan I can have my contacts load normally on Firefox and Ubuntu here.

    Nimbuzz currently don't support Android. I guess it is because it doesn't allow voip.

    My favorite versions are Symbian and IPhone.

    ReplyDelete