Where was I when it finally happened?  Has my proverbial head been in the sand?  Finally you can make outgoing calls directly from your computer using Google Voice. I’ve been waiting and watching for this and apparently it slipped through without me hearing about it.  Both Lifehacker.com and Makeuseof.com have done write-ups about it but why haven’t I heard about it?  Maybe it just recently became available in my area?  Who knows.  I’ve gotta pay better attention!

This has been a feature many people have been looking forward to.  The catch?  You have to do it through your Gmail account.  Oh, and you have to install a browser plugin.  No biggie though, right?  Now you can sign up with Google Voice, take part in all of the cool calling features AND make outgoing calls!

What happened was that a link at the bottom of the Google homepage caught my eye.

Now that I have installed the plugin a link to make calls shows up in my email.

When I click on the “call phone” link a keypad opens for me.

Notice the search option.  This allows me to search for Google Voice contacts on the fly.

I’ve tested this feature on a couple of calls and I have no complaints as far as VoIP services go.  Maybe I’ll eventually get a headset or something so I can make some real use of the new feature.

OK, so Google is RIGHT NOW beginning to release Google Buzz, some sort of social network-meet twitter-meet Facebook thing and it seems the Internet and Twitter is all a BUZZ about it.  I’ve nabbed A FEW links from Google Search’s live search stream just to share a bit about what people are saying RIGHT now:

• Google’s page on it: Google Buzz
• Mashable’s take: BREAKING: Google Goes Social with Google Buzz
• Wall Street Journal’s take: Google Adds ‘Buzz’ to Gmail
• Gizmodo’s take: What is Google Buzz?
• Business Insider’s take: The Truth About Google Buzz: It’s Late, Boring, And Lame
• IT World’s take: Google announces Buzz: Social features in Gmail
• SiliconRepublic’s take: Google makes the inbox go social with Buzz
• PCWorld’s take: Gmail Goes Social with Google Buzz

I haven’t even mentioned the tweets going on about this right now!  Anyway, thanks @brettbarner for keeping me informed!

So what do you think about this whole thing?  Good idea?  bad idea?  Too little, too late?  Awesome entrance into the Social Networking realm of Facebook and Twitter?  The prediction line is open!  What do you think?

Physical manifestation of what my email inbox would look like

If you are anything like me, you have tons of email.  If you are a user of one of those web-mail sites like Gmail or Hotmail where you have tons of space, you may not even delete old email messages (with Gmail’s archiving option, why would you need to?).  For instance, in my old Hotmail inbox I currently have 3119 messages and most of them I have no intention of going back to organize them any time soon.

This brings up the question of this post: How do YOU organize your email messages so you can go back to find them when you need them?

Many webmail sites use folders that you can set up in order to organize your messages by topic or importance.  You can either drag and drop your messages into the appropriate folders or you can set up filters to automatically send them there.  Gmail uses a different, but similar, but much more flexible system with what they call tags instead of folders.  This way messages can have several different tags and therefore they can be in several different categories at the same time.  Either way, there is always a way to organize those email messages.

You’ll also notice that most webmail sites also have an email search box.  This way if you are looking for a very specific email in a very disorganized inbox (cough, cough!), all you have to do is type in a few search terms and you’ll hopefully find the message without an issue.  In fact, if a message in Gmail is archived, it is removed from the inbox altogether but it’ll still show up for searches.  When I began to hear that people are beginning to lose patience with organization tools and are beginning to rely on searches to find their long lost email messages, I began to not feel as guilty about my own jumbled up mess of an email inbox!

OK, so come clean!  How do you go about finding those lost emails from 5 years ago that you never thought you’d ever need?  Let me know, I could use the help!

OK, those of you who know me know that text messaging sometimes gets on my nerves.  As you can tell from past articles, such as the one I wrote on the topic of texting while driving, I have a view that texting CAN be useless and even dangerous.  Well, as it turns out, Google is beginning to force me to change my mind… to a point.

ALSO, if you know me, I do not have a data plan on my phone, neither do I have the need to, neither do I see the need to in the foreseeable future.  Google is actually helping me in this area.  As long as I have unlimited SMS, I can do many cool things without an expensive data plan.

You see, I just recently upgraded my phone to one of those “messaging” phones which has a quirty keypad making texting a whole lot easier.  Having the ability now to actually type, I’ve been exploring what I can actually do with SMS besides the obvious corny messages between friend and family.  Well, as it turns out, there are several ways that SMS can enhance the way you use Gmail and Google Calendars.  I’m sure these tricks have been kicked around for awhile, but here is what I get out of it.

SMS and Gmail

There are a few ways that SMS can work with Gmail.  I’ve figured them out by either messing around or by, you guessed it, Googling it!

1. I can be notified via SMS when I get email.  That, in and of itself is cool, you can do that with any email service, just forward email to (yournumber)@(your phone carrier, such as vtext for Verizon).com.  With Verizon you can set up a nickname, too to cut out using your own number.  With Gmail’s labels and filters, I can actually choose what kind of email to notify me about.  For instance, I set up a filter to send all emails from my wife to my vtext email address.  At this point, I am notified that I need to pick up milk, or whatever.



2. I can use Gmail to take a note for me so I will remember it later when checking my email.  I set up a filter to label all email with a phrase like “makeamemo” anywhere in the email with a label such as “MEMOS.”  So now I can just send an SMS to my Gmail address and have a nifty list of memos to remember. Notice that I made sure it filters only email from my address so no mistaken mail gets plopped there.  ALSO I made sure that the messages skip the inbox so that doesn’t get cluttered.

I am sure there is more I can do with Gmail and SMS.  I am still learning.  As I learn, I will share.

SMS and Google Calendars

Here are a couple of tricks I learned about Google Calendar and how SMS can enhance my use of it.

First you’ll want to set up your Google Calendar account to work with your cell phone.  Just click settings and follow the instructions in the mobile setup section.

1. I can have Google send me an SMS reminder of an appointment coming up.  I am SO bad at remembering appointments, especially if they are made a long time in advance.  Well, I could either mess with my phone’s calendar, which I’d rather not, OR I can have Google calendar remind me.  With the flexibility and ease of use that Google Calendar provides, it seems an obvious choice.



2. I can MAKE appointments on my Google Calendar via SMS!  I think that is the coolest thing EVER!  All I have to do is send a message to the number Google provides me (48368), make sure the date, time, and details are all in there, and bodda-bing!  Google will then send a confirmation SMS making sure the date, time and details are recorded correctly so there’s no worries there.  For more information, check out the post in Google’s help pages.

The idea here is that I don’t really need a data plan when I have SMS, and therefore I save money.  I’m sure there are more ways that you can use SMS with Google’s services.  Have you read my post about filtering and canned messages?  I’m still looking to learn more so if you know of any more hacks or tricks I can use SMS for, let me know.  AND, as usual, I will share with y’all what I learn!

Admittedly, I am new to the gmail scene.

I’ve always used Hotmail, even before Microsoft took them over.  Yes, way back then.  I have been hesitating, then hesitating, and even hesitating to move to another webmail service.  There are many things I don’t like about Hotmail, but, hey, there are also many things to get used to somewhere else.  For years I’ve had this struggle, until just recently.

I signed up for a gmail account quite some time ago, but I just never got into using it.  Many parts of gmail are foreign to me, including the whole idea of labels instead of folders.  It’s just one of those things.  Gmail has kind of changed the whole email thing, to the point that sometimes it’s difficult to get into it.  Well, recently I starting using gmail a bit more.  I haven’t tossed out my Hotmail account just yet, but I’m tinkering, and I love tinkering!  I hooked up my domain with Google apps so I can have my domain’s emails handled by gmail and I kinda like that.  I hate using desktop-based email clients because I like being able to check my email from any browser anywhere.  I also didn’t like some of the other options such as Squirlmail.  SO, I starting messing with gmail once again.

Also, since beginning to write for MakeUseOf.com, I’ve had to use gmail for my @makeuseof email address, which is fine.  All of this just keeps pointing me towards taking a real look at gmail.  Well, while handling a large number of emails from MakeUseOf.com readers, I was able to learn a trick or two in order to handle the influx:

First off, I realized how easy it was to create a filter that would filter emails with specific words and give them a specific label.

This was really cool, because I had a lot of emails from people needing the same thing.  This way I could glance at just the emails filtered for me.  That was cool enough, but I can also do that with Hotmail.  I’ve talked about filtering before, but gmail’s ease is overwhelming.  The thing with Hotmail is that it uses folders.  That means that a message is either in one folder or the other.  That’s OK, but I’m beginning to prefer the flexibility of having the option to have the message show up in several places.  In other words, with gmail I’m able to have a message tagged with several labels, helping me to organize them better.  For instance, I can label all emails from a specific person with their name (or whatever) and also label all emails with a specific topic and messages from that person would show in both places.  I like that.

I realized that I could add and delete labels at will.

I could even remove the “inbox” label and remove the clutter from my inbox.  I think that the “archive” option does the same thing (removes the message from the inbox but still keeping the other tags, AND if there aren’t any, the messages will still show in search results – cool!).

I was extremely impressed with how easy it is to create and use canned messages.

If you find yourself replying with the same or similar message over and over again, you can save it and have it ready with the click of a button.  Oh, boy did this feature make my day!  In the situation with all of those emails from MakeUseOf readers, my job got A LOT easier!  All it took to reply was to click reply, click the canned response I wanted, and click send!  It sounds kind of impersonal, but in the situation it was quite necessary and it really wasn’t a big deal not responding personally.

Using filters WITH canned messages sealed the deal for me!

When I figured out that I could set up a filter, and have a canned response AUTOMATICALLY replied to the sender, I almost fell out of my seat!  This means that I could have SEVERAL things going on, people emailing me asking for SEVERAL different things, and all I have to do is set up a few filters???  Now that takes the cake!  And I love cake!

Anyways, I know gmail has been around for some time now, and that there is a possibility that some of the features are very well known, but I am still impressed!  I’m ready to learn gmail!  I’m also ready to learn how gmail can help ease the transition from other email providers.  This should be fun.

It occured to me after writing my last post entitled: “My Email’s Being Filtered” that you may be using a different email service than Hotmail.  Here I will share some of the steps to set up filters in Yahoo Email and Gmail.  If you need help with a different email service, let me know, perhaps I can still help.

Meanwhile, lets begin with Yahoo:

1. Sign into your email account (seems like a good first step)
2. In the upper right hand corner there is a drop down menu called “options”, then choose “Mail Options”
3. Now you’ll find a menu down the left hand side and on that list you’ll find “Filters”
4. Click on “Create or edit filters”

Instead of using folders, Gmail uses what it calls “labels.”  They do about the same thing.  Here’s how to filter email in Gmail:

1. Sign into your Gmail account (getting sick of reading this step yet?)
2. At the top of the page beside the search buttons you’ll see a “create a filter” link
3. Fill in the criteria of the messages you want filtered and then click next (notice you can click “test search” to see which of your emails would have been tagged)
4. On the next step you choose what to do with the tagged emails.

So there you go!  Comments or questions are welcomed!