Shortly before moving to Europe, it occurred to me that although I was about to (very happily, by the way) cancel my AT&T cellular account, it would be a good idea to still maintain a US phone number.  What I needed was a number that would a) cost nothing, b) go straight to voice mail, and c) allow me easy access to any messages via email and/or a web interface.

Enter Google Voice – good on all three counts.  One potential problem, though: since (at least so far) Google Voice is designed to be merely a phone management/aggregation service rather than a standalone (Skype-like) internet telephony solution, it’s not possible to create a Google Voice account without tying it to an already existing traditional (i.e. land line or cellular) phone number.

Would my Google-based voice mail solution continue to work after the AT&T number I created it with ceased to exist  a few days later?  Luckily, yes.  Granted, if I want to, say, record a new outgoing message, I have to temporarily tie my account to additional (working) US phone number to do it – but even if that’s a bit of a hack, it’s not too inconvenient, given how useful it’s been to have a US number (albeit voice mail only).

So far, the Google Voice service has been limited to the US, though – so for making calls back to the states, I’ve had to rely on Skype.  While Skype works great (from both my computer and my iPhone), in the interest of simplicity I wouldn’t mind getting my transatlantic phone solutions (incoming and outgoing) all under one roof, though – which is why the recent news of the imminent rollout of Google Voice in Europe (announced during a surprise appearance by Google’s Jens Redmer at the European Pirate Summit conference in Köln) was of interest.

Redmer gave no indication of when the service might launch over here, but he did mention that Google is already testing Google Voice internally – so one would have to assume the technology is pretty much there.  What he did cite as a potential holdup were the various European legislative hurdles Google would have to overcome.  This is not surprising – what’s interesting about the timing of all this, though, is that the EU is expected to decide on whether to allow Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype in the next week or two.  Whether or not the Skype ruling and the Google Voice announcement are merely coincidental, it’ll be interesting to see if and/or how the two affect each other – especially given that (until Microsoft’s acquisition goes through, at least) Skype is a European company.

First it was the era of the call center:  “You call is very important to us – Estimated hold time: 47 minutes”.

Next, it was decided that the call center was a little more than we all deserved, and soon CRM phone systems were inviting us instead to visit the corporate support website (shortly before politely hanging up on us).  No problem, the website often had a live chat feature.  From a cost-cutting  perspective, the live chat feature was a brilliant inovation: in the added time needed for a customer to type their question rather than speak it in real time, still more productivity could be squeezed out of the support staff, who could now be asked to handle several customers simultaneously (all while the customer on the other end has the illusion of receiving individual personal service).

What could  be the next step in the evolution of online customer service management technology?  Here’s Continental Airlines with their take on a more recent innovation: let’s just fake the live web chat.  Let’s camouflage  a simple HTML search form as a live chat feature – we can include a wholesome, smiling, helpful-looking avatar, her hands (just out of sight) surely poised above a computer keyboard to answer our questions.  We can even give her a name – let’s call her “Alex”.

That’s what I ran into while tracking down my Hurricane Irene-related refund from Continental recently (it turns out there’s nothing like a hurricane to close almost everything down in Manhattan by noon and make a Saturday afternoon in my old hometown as quiet as a Saturday afternoon  in Berlin,  my new hometown – but that’s another story).

The thing is, I would much rather be put on hold or given an email form to fill out than have my intelligence insulted by ‘Alex’ – I guess disingenuous software and user interface design is just a pet peeve of mine.

P.S. On the other hand, I really get a kick out of clever website design – even small gems like the status line I once saw atop the comedy central website: “You are so not logged in”

Social networks are funny things: value to the user is determined less by the quality of the network itself than by the number of that user’s friends also using the network.

To put it another way: if show business is like “high school with money”, so it is (even more so) with social networks – popularity is everything.

In fact, it’s almost a zero-sum game: myspace kills off friendster, facebook kills off myspace…  It seems there can only be one dominant social network at a time (twitter coexists peacefully only because it’s more of an ‘opt-in broadcast network’ than a social network).

In this context, at a few months in, it’s time to ask: will google+ end up replacing facebook?  I’ve been a member of the beta  since day one (more on that here).  While I’ve yet to actually post anything (full disclosure: social networks are more interesting to me as a medium and cultural phenomenon than as something I’d choose to use personally) – I have had a ringside seat from which to witness user uptake of the service.

Below is my firsthand account of how’s it’s been going so far – at least from amongst my ‘circle’ (sorry, couldn’t resist) of friends and colleagues…

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