The service looks a lot like Gmail for voicemail, although you don’t have to be a Gmail user to use it. It lets you retrieve transcripts of your voicemail, archive and search all your sent and received SMS messages, and you can make calls directly from Google Voice’s interface. The calls are free in the US, and cost a small fee internationally.

Watch this video from Google:

So here’s the really cool part for us writers…

You can call Google Voice and leave yourself messages.  Google will automatically transcribe the messages into text and email them to you!

So, next time you’re in the car or you just don’t feel like typing, you can simply call Google Voice and you’ll get your words emailed back to you.  How cool is that!!

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While certain bloggers and press people worked themselves up over Beacon, Facebook’s members tended to go on with life.  “The day after Facebook announced the news feed, 587,715 members joined a protest group called ‘Students against Facebook News Feed.’  Keep in mind, Facebook only had 9 million members at that point,” pointed out Nicholas Carlson.

He then wrote, “Compare that to the protest group MoveOn.org launched on November 20.  Two weeks later, only 70,000 members have joined.  That’s only 0.1 percent of Facebook’s 57 million active users protesting the product.”

Revealing, no?  Now Jay Meattle has jumped in with more statistics; he found that Facebook experienced a 20.2 percent month-over-month jump in unique visitors, a 4.9 percent increase in sessions, and a 2.6 percent rise in page views during November.

With Beacon now tameable, and Facebook messages going straight to email, even greater growth rates seem likely in the future.  This should make MySpace, Bebo, and everything else in Facebook’s way very concerned.

Is your ex-girlfriend sending a Christmas greeting or a wish-you-would-die rant?  Thanks to this development, you can know immediately!  Or, for more mundane matters, tell if someone’s just “LOL”ing to conclude a conversation or has asked another series of questions to which you’ll need to respond.

On that note comes one significant issue – you’ll need to sign into the social network to send a proper Facebook message back.  It seems possible to send an email by just hitting the standard “reply” button, however, and we’ll give Facebook credit for sacrificing a number of page views, either way.

Meanwhile, MySpace and other social networks are looking even more dated than they did before, and Michael Arrington, to whom I owe a hat tip, called Facebook’s step forward “great . . . frickin wonderful, even.”  So the social network’s phenomenal growth should continue into the foreseeable future.

This story is NOT going away. Even if this particular story goes away, there’s a bad taste in our mouths because Facebook tried to do something that clearly wasn’t for the users. When David Weinberger, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, says that you have a real PR problem.

Yet when I look at TechMeme I don’t see ONE SINGLE INTERVIEW that Mark Zuckerberg, or top executives at Facebook, have given ANYONE.

Hell, don’t like me or other bloggers? Then give a press conference with professional press.

ANYTHING would be better than the way that Facebook is handling this.

This is what happens when a startup gets a controlling PR belief system. Steve Jobs can pull that off. Not many companies can.

Facebook’s PR machinery is hiding its head in the sand and hoping this story goes away.

Hint: it’s not.

Do the press conference. Admit you screwed up. Take your shots. Look into the camera and say you’re sorry.

Crisis PR hint: don’t answer company bashing with text messages. Do it in video and with live events. Have the CEO do it.

Or don’t. It’s your reputation, not mine that’s at stake here.

Or, maybe, Zuckerberg is about to get fired from his CEO job? That’s the gesture that’s being communicated to the world by not appearing in person and doing a press conference.

It’s amazing to see how fast Zuckerberg’s stock is falling in the conversation networks I’m hanging out in.

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1.2 billion messages per week (or around 4,000 per second) is the current rate, and in an interview with the BBC, the MDA’s head, Mike Short, admitted, “It has exceeded our forecasts quite significantly.”  You can hardly blame his group, though – those are astonishing figures, and given some of the headlines related to this milestone, they appear to have caught everyone off-guard.

“Text Maniacs Send Billion Messages A Week,” states a DailyRecord.co.uk article.  “Brits go text crazy,” suggests womenintechnology.co.uk.  And the AHN chips in, “Britons Addicted To Text Messaging.”

Granted, the UK’s interest in text messaging doesn’t look like much next to China’s – about 8.3 billion text messages are sent each week in that nation.  Still, since computers are more prevalent in the UK, it’s interesting to see that cheap rates and text messaging’s overall convenience have also caught on there.

The MDA and Short say that Brits are on track to send 52 billion messages in 2007.

Lindsey Abrams of Patriot, Indiana, says she began receiving text messages that were meant for other Facebook members after she received a new cell number from Verizon in November 2006.

The text messages contained explicit language, according to Abram’s civil complaint. Allegedly she was charged 10 cents per message and was told she could not block the Facebook text messages without blocking messages she wanted to receive.

Abram’s lawyer wants to make the lawsuit a certified class action, and maintains that other subscribers with recycled phone numbers have been inundated with unwanted Facebook text messages containing party invitations and unwanted sexual advances.

Jay Edelson, a Chicago attorney representing Abrams, said he wants to make Facebook take action so it members would not be able to send text messages to recycled phone numbers.

Facebook would not comment on the suit saying its company policy not to discuss lawsuits.

EU Wants Price Caps On Text Messages

"I call on operators to deal with the problem of high prices for text messages and data," EU Telecommunications Commissioner Viviane Reding said.

Reding said if her recommendations are ignored by mobile operators that she would release a report at the end of next year examining if price caps should also be applied to text messages.

EU mobile users have seen the cost of using their mobile phones while traveling in Europe drop by 60 percent since roaming price caps were put into place over the summer, according to the European Commission.

European mobile operators are prohibited from charging EU subscribers making country-to-country calls in the 27-nation bloc more than 49-euro cents (69 U.S. cents) a minutes in the first year of application and receiving a call could not cost more than 24 cents.

The price cap for roaming services is scheduled to drop again in the second year to 46 and 22 cents and then 43 and 19 cents in the third year according to the AP.

The European Commission said that 200 million users had switched to the Eurotariff and that the majority of mobile operators had made the transition faster than they were legally required to and activated the Eurotariff in July or August.

Conclusions and insights from this should obviously be taken with a pinch of salt as this is a pretty homogeneous group, but some of the answers to Guy’s questions were stunning to me, and I consider myself extremely savvy.
 

You can see the entire Veotag video here, which has the wonderful feature of bookmarking different parts of the video with hyper links (which I have done in the bullet points).

• In this panel of 6 people 2 of them (girls) send over 4000 text messages in a month
• Very few of them watched more than a couple of hours of TV a week and all of it was tivo’d so all ads were skipped
• Almost all of them subscribed to or at least read wired
• Almost all of them are on Verizon
• When asked what gadget or service they would want they almost all wanted a converged mobile device that held everything all their content, music, video, and acted as a billing device so they could buy stuff
• All of them were on myspace or facebook (no surprise there)
• None of them knew what RSS was
• Non of them wrote a blog but most read them
• Only one of them knew what a wiki was but they all used wikipedia

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“[Y]ou can enter a friend’s email address into the To: line when you send a message or share an album, and Facebook will email them the message,” announced Luke Shepard on The Facebook Blog.  “Your friends will be able to reply without signing up, and they will be able to see content you share with them.”

This development could keep some people from ever again using ordinary email; two months ago, CNET’s Stefanie Olsen had already found, “Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead.”  That’s not to say that Facebook has perfected anything here – Nick O’Neill notes that its messaging system needs help on the organizational and search-related fronts – but the message-to-email option is nice to have.

Granted, one aspect of the option may annoy some people; Shepard wrote, “Keep in mind that all rules of privacy still apply; some Facebook content that you share (photos, groups, notes, etc.) won’t be visible to your friend.”

But in the end, that could encourage a few hangers-back to finally join the social network.  Recent Nielsen//NetRatings numbers suggest that Facebook grew by 129 percent in the past year, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next few months.

Computer Messages May Not Be Private

Social networks like MySpace and Facebook make promises that they will protect member privacy. But a sexual assault case in New Jersey may force them to renege on that promise.

Law.com goes into complete detail, but here’s the short and not-so-sweet version.

In the case T.V. vs. Union Township Board of Education, where the plaintiff alleges the school failed to take steps to prevent a sexual assault by a fellow student, and thus contributed to the victim’s emotional distress.

The assailant was convicted previously, so, as often happens in these cases, there’s no heart-rending exploration of accuser credibility.

But now the school board’s defense team has to look for evidence against emotion distress – which sounds silly on the surface, of course there was distress.

It’s the inglorious obligation of the defense team in this case, though, to explore the extent of distress, its likely causes, and make a case that the school was not at fault.

Defense, though, wants to force MySpace and Facebook to hand over the text of private messages made by the plaintiff in order to examine evidence of said distress.

Rest easy for now all you staunch privacy advocates. The judge in the case has denied the request, requiring the defense to do more discovery work. But she might change her mind.

This case is another reminder that there may be no real privacy on the Internet. As a general rule, then, if you don’t want it known, to type it out and push the send button – even if it’s supposed to be a "private" message.