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You set the number to ring at your desk during the day, on your mobile phone while you’re commuting and at your home phone in the evening.  You can set it so only certain incoming calls go through; only family can reach you after 9pm, say.  The idea is to separate the phone number from the device, which takes power away from the phone company and gives it to Google.  I don’t like my phone company much so this is fine with me, but you do have to worry about how much personal information, now phone calls, are flowing through Google.

Ten years ago I had a ‘follow-me’ number that functioned more or less like this new Google Voice service.  It makes sense; you shouldn’t have to know the IP address of the computer you’re sending email to, which is essentially what you’re doing when you’re calling someone on their phone number (the POTS version of the phone’s IP address.)

What I learned is that people so strongly associate the phone number with the device that, at least back then, it was a waste to try to disassociate them.  People would capture my cell phone number when I called them and use that rather than what I thought was the simpler way of just using my follow-me number.  So I’m going to be pretty leery of that feature of Google Voice for the near future.

But there’s one fantastic feature which I just discovered and absolutely love.  The service integrates with Gmail’s contact list, which unfortunately is kinda crummy, and lets you dial phone numbers on your contact list.  It then asks you what number you want to use — your home phone, your mobile phone, the phone in the conference room you’re sitting in, whatever.  And then it dials you, first.  The phone rings, you answer.  And then the phone on the other end starts to ring.  It’s like telling Betty to put a call into Sam’s office: “I have Sam’s office on the line, sir!”  If I had an assistant named Betty that is.

I spend a lot of time in my home office communicating with colleagues via IM.  Often, it’s just to check in to see if they’re available to talk on the phone.  The conversation goes like this:

Ed: Hi, I just got off my last call

Hank: Hey

Ed: Do you still need to talk to me?

Hank: Yeah, do you ahve a minute?

Ed: Sure, what #?

Hank: (212) 867-5309

Ed: ring

(Ironically, as I’ve been writing this, the exact scenario has just played out on IM: I need to wrap this up to get to that call.)

This isn’t the way CTI (computer-telephony integration) was supposed to play out, but perhaps we can integrate Google Voice into IM to simplify the process.  What I’d ideally like to be able to do is to update the statusphere about my availability and then have a button on my IM for Hank.  Then my phone and his phone would ring.  If we needed to add more people, we could conference them in the same way — just have more phones ring.

They’ve opened up their search engine, via their Open Search Platform initiative and are now extending that to an ‘open search ecosystem‘ that builds on the data web. Details are still emerging, but it looks like Yahoo is going to use lightweight semantics to try to connect data silos, rather than the traditional, now heavyweight, view of the Semantic Web — what the cool kids now call Web 3G.

You will be able to see this approach in projects such as Yahoo’s FireEagle, still in closed beta, which will provide location information with some privacy controls. Mor Naaman, a Yahoo researcher, has an example of FireEagle in action on his Stanford homepage; it’s a widget with his location — extracted from his mobile phone? — linked to current weather conditions there and a geo-tagged Flickr photo from that same place. Naaman recently argued that this lightweight approach will be successful in a way that the full-blown semantic web has never been able to achieve: “The Semantic Web is Dead” is the title of his piece.

For a more in-depth view of where Yahoo might be going with this, a colleague of Naaman’s at Yahoo Research, Tom Coates, has a good presentation, “Native to a Web of Data” (16Mb .pdf) on the subject.

Lots of questions, of course, remain about the viability — and then the monetization — of this approach, but there is a groundswell of this kind of lightweight semantics; tagging, for example, or the structuring of Wikipedia articles, or microformats for a bewildering variety of information — resumes, for instance.

Will Yahoo be able to remain independent? What would happen to these initiatives if Microsoft is successful? What will be Google’s response? Even assuming an independent Yahoo, will these lightweight 3G efforts ever make them money? How? The road to the Semantic Web is littered with many broken promises.

Michael Arrington notes that the Yahoo acquisition is getting very expensive, in terms of Microsoft’s market cap; Microsoft has “lost nearly $40 billion in market cap in the eight trading days since they made their offer.” In other words, “Microsoft has shrunk by a Yahoo in the last eight days.”

Henry Blodget has a must-read piece on the logic of the deal; he argues that Microsoft is confusing the ad-driven consumer business with the license-driven corporate business. This makes sense to me; Microsoft needs to defend the Office franchise in the corporate environment, where even Google is getting license revenue ($50/user/year for Google Apps) in lieu of advertising. Enterprises aren’t going to use ad-supported free software, at least not in any future I can see. So why should Microsoft take on the pain that is Yahoo for the consumer side? Blodget writes, “Put differently, the part of Google that threatens Microsoft’s core Windows and Office business is Google Apps, not Google Search.”

So the question becomes: how do you analyze all this? Traditionally, people have taken a static reporting approach, which has its place, but you need more when you have to be actively responsive. When was the last time David Hasselhof logged on? Where was he? What systems did he log onto? Did he look at Michael Jackson’s billing records?

Long ago, people thought that some kind of library-like structure was required in order to discover information on the Internet, but it turned out that brute-force searching was better. Likewise in this case, where the end goal is a Google-like interface. Now, this approach has its limitations. You have to know what you’re looking for, first of all. It doesn’t do correlations. It’s got a beautifully simple interface, but it’s not an easy UI for normal, proactive review. It’s not for canned reports. It’s not a SEM (Security Event Manager, or SIEM: Security Information and Event Manager) tool.

But for what it is, it’s great. It’s easy to look at Splunk and say, “you’re just indexing text,” but there is great power in that; look at Google. There been such a huge emphasis on auditability that we’ve generated huge files of events, but mostly they just sit there unloved. Splunk is a good way to leverage that resource.

Google has quietly added facial recognition to its image search.   If you do an image search and append &imgtype=face at the end of the URL, you get only the faces associated with that search.  So, for example, an image search of “Novell” gives you screenshots, network diagrams, box shots and the like.  But if you append &imgtype=face, you get only people’s faces.  Cool, but scary.

Another couple of webcasts from our hero, Prof. Hans Rosling of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and Gapminder (acquired, inevitably, by Google.)

In the first webcast, Rosling using his Trendalyzer visualization tool to describe economic and social change in Sweden over the past three hundred years. If he doesn’t convince you to wash your hands, no one will.

Recently, both the United Nations and OECD (announcment here) have committed to opening up their statistical databases free of charge. In his second webcast, Rosling points out, all of the country-level statistical data — in the whole world, ever — is a smaller download than “Lord of the Rings.”

As before, both are well worth watching, not only for the content of what you learn, but how Rosling delivers the message; it’s a miracle of data visualization and a heartening message about the possibilities of the future.

(Previous post about Rosling here.)

But here’s why, today, I think Google’s great, and it cost me two bucks. My five year old was looking forward to watching a show (”FETCH! With Ruff Ruffman,” whose appeal escapes me) this afternoon on PBS. But it turns out that since we only have old-fashioned over-the-air analog television — which is practically a war crime, I know — that particular show wasn’t on at the promised time. I assume he saw an ad for some PBS cable channel. Anyway, it was his television for the day and he was bitterly disappointed. Sobbing.

Google to the rescue. First, I tried going to the PBS website, but they only had lame games and, frustratingly, trailers for the show. YouTube, nothing. But a quick Google search offered me the entire first season in the Google Video Player (soon to be deprecated in favor of YouTube?) for $1.99/episode. So I got 29 minutes of relief from child care on a Sunday afternoon and Google got my undying gratitude.