The latest attempt by Google to own your soul is Google Voice and it's a lovely idea. Get a telephone number from Big G, and you can then link that to any of your other phone numbers - work, home, mobile and so on. You can change your personal numbers as necessary and simply update your profile. Moreover, you can also assign certain callers to specific telephones, so if someone from your family rings all your phones can ring, or professional calls are directed to you work phone and so on. Alternatively calls can be transcribed for you to read later.
Lovely idea. Except it's a huge amount of control over your life that you're giving to Google. Letting them keep your search strategies, results and providing content to you is one thing, letting them look after your email is another step forward, but at least for me this is a stage that's too far. (Though of course this is all academic at the moment since the service is slowly being rolled out through the US but I've not seen anything yet to tell me when it's going international.) How long is it going to take before the *only* phone number that you give people is your Google Voice number? And then what happens when Google's service goes down? Because down it will go at some point. Or if you get locked out of your account? Yes, it's unlikely, but it does happen now and then. At least at the moment if I can't be contacted on one number it's easy for people to get me on another. If the only number they have is my Google Voice number I'm going to be uncontactable.
That's a very scary thought.
Lovely idea. Except it's a huge amount of control over your life that you're giving to Google. Letting them keep your search strategies, results and providing content to you is one thing, letting them look after your email is another step forward, but at least for me this is a stage that's too far. (Though of course this is all academic at the moment since the service is slowly being rolled out through the US but I've not seen anything yet to tell me when it's going international.) How long is it going to take before the *only* phone number that you give people is your Google Voice number? And then what happens when Google's service goes down? Because down it will go at some point. Or if you get locked out of your account? Yes, it's unlikely, but it does happen now and then. At least at the moment if I can't be contacted on one number it's easy for people to get me on another. If the only number they have is my Google Voice number I'm going to be uncontactable.
That's a very scary thought.
Big G rules the world? It certainly seems as though it's trying to but do we want a world ruled by Google? I don't.
Posted by: Hazel Edmunds | June 28, 2009 at 07:24 AM