Google Voice, which lets users consolidate all their phones under one number, archive your texts and voicemails, and much, much more, is two things to most people: vaguely promising, and totally confusing. Here’s how to make the switch, in plain English.

The Pitch

It doesn’t really help to describe Google Voice in terms of what it is—a bizarrely fragmented hodgepodge of different telecom and internet technologies, drawn together by Google—so you just have to start with what it does. In short, it can completely change how you use your phones, more or less for free.

• It can give all of your phones the same number for incoming calls. Google will assigned you a new, Google Voice-specific phone number for free, which you can forward to as many phones as you want. What always drives the point of Google Voice home for people is when I have them call my number, which causes three of my phones to ring at once. You can keep this number forever, too, without ever having to worry about porting it from carrier to carrier.
• It can give your phones the same outgoing number as well, with which you can make free domestic calls (well, sort of—more on that later), and very cheap international calls. Since Google Voice routes your calls through their phone system, they can connect you directly to cheap VoIP services to the rest of the world. It seems like you're just making a regular call, but behind the scenes you're doing something more akin to Skyping. End result: money saved.
• You can send and receive unlimited text messages for free. To make things even better, they’re all all archived in your online Google Voice account, where they’re fully searchable.
• It's got the best voicemail system in the world. Leaving a message at a Google Voice number is nothing like leaving your voice on a regular voicemail service—that is to say, it's not like sending your voice into a barely accessible technological horror pit where it might get listened to, but will probably be ignored. No, Google Voice is different: It stores your messages online, and converts them to text (which can then be sent to you as an SMS or an email). You can archive, forward, delete or save these messages from a simple interface on your phone or computer. Think of it as Gmail, except with voices. Plus, it's flexible in lots of little ways—you can change your voicemail greetings on a per caller basis, for example, or opt to listen to voicemails as they're being recorded.
• This voicemail system isn't just for Google Voice numbers, either—you essentially replace your carrier voicemail with Google Voice voicemail, without using a new number. It's brilliant.
• You have full control over your calls. You can record them for later listening, and have them transcribed into text.
• You can screen callers. You can block numbers, or have callers record their names for your approval. You can have certain contacts only forwarded to certain phones,

Each of these features is compelling enough on its own—together, they'll totally change how you use your phones, changing you from a mere mobile customer to a full-on switchboard operator, self-spy, info hoarder and telco executive. It's like you run your own little phone company, just for yourself. For free. Spectacular.

The Catch(es)

Now that I’ve got you all riled, it’s time for me to pour an icy bucket of water down the front of your pants. Google Voice, as incredible a concept and service as it is, isn’t perfect. In fact, there are a few things you need to know and accept before taking the dive, and they might be dealbreakers:

• You can't use your own phone number. At least, not in the way you wish you could. In an ideal world, you'd be able to port your old cellphone number to Google Voice, and have that—the digits people have been using to get in touch with you for years—be your new all-inclusive point of contact. You can't do this yet. For now, the closest you can come is to port your voicemail to Google Voice. That means that your T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon or Sprint number's voicemail can be outsourced to Google, but not its calls. You can unify all your phones under your new Google Voice number, but that means you have to switch. Along with the basic inconvenience of telling everyone about your new number, you’re trusting an awful lot in a beta service, the terms of which could change quickly and without notice. It’s not something I worry about, but it’s not nothing, either.

• You can’t record calls that you’ve placed, just calls that you’ve received. And every time you initiate recording, Google Voice notifies the other person on the line. This is all makes perfect moral and procedural sense, but just in case you had the impression that there were no limits on your recording abilities, well, there are.

• The mobile app situation isn't ideal. There are apps for Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and iPhone via jailbreak, and they all work. That said, they're not perfect—they can be slow, poorly integrated, glitchy, or hard to figure out. And since they're supposed to replace the dialer on your phone entirely, this isn't wonderful. The online mobile interface is a good fallback for placing calls and sending texts, but navigating to that adds an extra step to any call or text that can get tiresome after a while.

• Lastly, the way American phones work, you’re still going to end up paying for your minutes, somehow. Just because Google Voice says you can make free domestic calls and cheap international calls doesn’t mean that you actually can: in both cases, you need to dial out to Google Voice’s external system in the first place, which means you’re still using your monthly minute allotment. There are ways around this which I’ll discuss later, but Google Voice, as good as it is, isn’t magic.

Discouraged? Don’t be. Google Voice is still well worth you time and effort, and it’s only going to get better. Now, for God’s sake let’s get started already.

The Process

Signing up. This is simultaneously the easiest and most irritating part of Google Voice: It’s still invite only. Lucky for you, “Invite” in this case doesn’t mean you actually have to wait for an individual to select you from the masses; it’s just Google’s way of saying their keeping the signup pace down at manageable levels while the service is still in beta. Just submit your address, after which Google “anticipate[s] that it will be a short wait before you receive your invitation.”

What's a short wait? My invite took about four days. Some come within 48 hours. At worst, they take about two weeks. Lots of you will have already received your invite, and just not done a whole lot with it—you guys can keep reading—while the rest of you should just bookmark this post, and come back to it once you get your invite. Protip: check your spam filters.

—

Ok, hello again, people I was talking to anywhere between two seconds and two weeks ago! How are you? Now that you’ve got your invite, you can log in to your Google Voice Dashboard. It’ll look familiar if you’ve used any Google Service before:

Logging in. Follow your confirmation link, or navigate here. Click around for a while to get a feel for the interface. This is how you’ll manage your phones from now on. It’s liberatingly simple.

Picking your number. You’ll be given a choice of numbers, which you can choose from practically any available area code. Choose wisely: this will be your primary number from here on out. Choosing your first number is free; changing it in the future will cost you $10. Boo, waah, etcetera! But really not a huge deal.

Adding your phones. This is assuming you want to forward a single number to all your phones, which is kind of the point here, so: Go to the Google Voice settings page (up in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. In the first section, called “Phones,” click “Add a Phone” or “Add Another Phone.” Give it a name “My iPhone” and enter its phone number. That’s it.

Now you’ll be given a passcode, which you’ll use to authenticate your existing phone. Clicking “Connect” will call your phone from your Google Voice number, and a friendly robot will ask for you code. Enter it. That’s it!

Setting up your voicemail. Now that the phone is added, it can accept calls directed to your Google Voice number. If the call is ignored, it will forward the voicemail to Google Voice, where it will be stored online. Alternately, if you only want to use Google Voice for voicemail, you can disable the calling feature (by unchecking the box next to the phone), and set up the service to hijack your actual cellphone number’s voicemails—even when the call didn't get routed through Google Voice.

This is much easier that it sounds: Just click “Activate Google Voicemail” next to your newly-added phone, and enter the number they give you exactly as it’s written, symbols and all. Once you “call” that number, you’ll get some kind of message on your phone. On the iPhone, it looks like this.

Your voicemail has been switched—all you need to do now is set up a quick bookmark in your mobile phone to Google Voice, which provides a functional, if sparse, interface for your Google Voice messages. It's like visual voicemail, except through your browser. (Or a mobile app, which I'll get to soon.)

Choosing the rest of your settings. Now you’ll see your phone listed under the “Phones” settings tab. The other tabs contain a few pages of settings for your Google Voice account. How you toggle these is up to you, but here are the most important ones: If you want to forward SMSes to email, you’ll have to enable that in the “Voicemail and SMS” tab; call screening settings are located under the “Calls” tab; and international call credit can be added under the “Billing” tab, from a credit card.

Finding your feet. Take some time to experiment with some of Google Voice's core features now. Place a call using the button at the top left of the Google Voice homepage. Enter your recipient's number, and choose which of your phones you'd like to place the call with. Google Voice will call your phone first, which upon answering will immediately call your recipient's phone, which will think it's getting a call from your new Google Voice number. It might sound odd in writing, but once you see it work, it just kind of clicks. You can also place these calls from the mobile web interface, without a computer. Texting is more direct—you can send those directly from the web interface without any intervention from your phone.

Placing calls. The aforementioned methods is the most obvious, and it will reliably work. It’s a little cumbersome, especially if you’re used to just tapping on a contact and placing a call. Thankfully there are a few more ways to place calls from your phone, and have it routed through Google Voice:

• Apps: This is by far the best way to use Google Voice. Android has an official Google Voice app, as does BlackBerry.These automate the dialing/texting out process, so you don't need to mess with a web interface—you just opt to make some or all of your calls through Google Voice, and the app takes care of the rest. Windows Mobile has unofficial clients that do the job pretty well, as does the Pre, in the App Catalog. iPhone clients are available, but they’re not approved by Apple: You’ll need to jailbreak your phone and install them from Cydia.

• The call-in method: Simply dial your new Google Voice number from your cellphone or landline, press 2 once it’s connected, then enter the number you want to dial. This is less convenient than the web interface method, even, but it’s vital to the next one:

• The contact method: This is a little cheat to automate the aforementioned process. What you’re doing, basically, is saving your Google Voice number, a pause, the number 2 (which selects “call another phone” from the Google Voice automated menu tree), a pause, then your recipient’s number.

Adding a pause is different on each phone—on the iPhone, for example, you need to save a number as a contact, and in the number editing screen, press the "+*#" button at the bottom left of the keypad. The zero will be replaced with a "pause" button, which when pressed inserts a comma into the number. Google is your friend for this one, though most smartphones make the option available in their respective contact editing screens.

• The 406 method: Have the person you want to text send a message to your Google Voice account. When you receive the message, it will be from a number you don't recognize, with the area code 406. It will be labeled with the sending contact's name, and any replies to that number will return to the person who sent them, but the number is completely new. This is a Google Voice alias, which you can use forever: Just save it as part of your friend's contacts—perhaps as a secondary cellphone or a work number, whatever you can remember—and use it as their primary contact number when call through GV.

Sending Texts. Again, using the web interface is a great way to send texts, as are the mobile apps. But the best solution? The 406 trick listed above works for SMSes too.

The Hacks

As you've probably noticed, Google Voice is kind of a loose system—and a system that's ripe for a little gaming. There are two methods that currently work for getting truly unlimited, free calls over Google Voice. This is where things get really interesting. Interesting in a good way for you; interesting in a terrifying way for the phone companies.

• The Calling Circle Method: You know how some carriers let you designate a few contacts that don't count toward your monthly allotment of minutes, like T-Mobile MyFaves, or the AT&T A-List? By making your Google Voice number one of your friends, you can filter all your calls through Google, whether they be free domestic calls or cheap international calls. Once your Google number is added to your circle, making free calls is simply a matter of dialing into your Google Voice number and, using Google's audio menu system, dialing through to your recipient. (The contact method listed above will work too.)

To make incoming calls—including outgoing calls initiated from the Google Voice web interface—free, you'll need to change your Google Voice settings under the "Calls" tab. Select "Display my Google Voice Number" under the "Caller ID (in)" setting, and you're good to go. A full setup guide for the calling circle method can be found here.

Note: Designating Google Voice as one of your preferred contacts may be against your carrier's user policies—check with them if you're concerned.

• The VoIP method: By signing up for a number with free VoIP service Gizmo5 and adding to to your Google Voice account as a phone, you can place unlimited free calls from your VoIP number to landlines. You can also forward the calls through to Skype, if you’d prefer. This isn’t a solution for mobile phones, but it’s a great way to make yourself an effectively unlimited VoIP landline for free. Lifehacker’s got the whole rundown here. UPDATE: Registrations for Gizmo5 have been closed. Sorry!

Easing the Transition

Lifehacker has assembled a fantastic guide for easing the transition from many numbers to one, covering everything from how to convince people not to call your old numbers, to coping with voice latency.

That’s pretty much it! If you have any tips to tricks for getting the most out fo Google Voice, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides.

And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy Voicing, folks!

There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?

It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenID and the like all the time.

But those standards, while open, have failed to latch on in a meaningful way with the public at large. One of the holdups is that you have to set up a website or service you use to be your OpenID. It’s relatively easy to do, and you may already have one ready to go, but just not realize it. But it’s still kind of tricky to explain to a regular web user — wait, you login with your website?

But something everyone on the web knows is their email address. And they’re conditioned by services like Google and Facebook to use it as their identifier. The problem with it has been that it’s just a string of text, nothing more. You cannot attach information to it to let others know a bit more about you — something vital for true identification. Then idea behind WebFinger is that you should be able to attach any information you choose to your email address.

The excitement today is that a group of Googlers have apparently finally not only gotten Google’s support to pursue the project, but that they have started working the technical details. As Googler Brad Fitpatrick writes today:

In other words, we’ve eliminated both technical & political hurdles. We can now work on this spec, implement, push, try, rinse, repeat…. until we’re all reasonable happy.

Googler Brett Slatkin (incidentally, Fitzpatrick’s partner in making PubSubHubbub) explains to us that while it hasn’t been turned on yet, and that there’s still a lot of work to do on the spec, the idea is to go into testing mode soon. Fitzpatrick notes that there will be a small experiment going on internally with some Googlers’ Gmail accounts.

Without knowing much about the technical details behind it, the core idea behind WebFinger immediately strikes me as a good one. It’s taking something everyone knows on the web (your email address) and making it immensely more valuable as a way to identify yourself and information about you. Exactly what kind of information? Here are some of the ideas from the WebFinger Google Code page:

• public profile data
• pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
• a public key
• other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
• a URL to an avatar
• profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
• whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
• or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

This is definitely something to watch for in the coming months.

[photo: flickr/chris owens]

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One of the most fundamental reasons for Google’s success is the site’s speed — search queries typically take a fraction of a second, and most of the company’s other services are usually very snappy as well (save for Gmail, which occasionally bogs down). Part of this speed can be attributed to the company’s obsession with minimalist design and its vast server farms, but you can be sure there’s no shortage of optimization that’s going on to make sure pages load as quickly as possible on the front end, too.

To help streamline its sites, Google has been using an internal tool called Page Speed, and starting today it’s opening up the tool to the developer community. The newly open-sourced tool is a Firefox plugin that integrates with Firebug, making suggestions on how to speed up your site based on best practices.

From the Google blog post:

For example, Page Speed automatically optimizes images for you, giving you a compressed image that you can use immediately on your web site. It also identifies issues such as JavaScript and CSS loaded by your page that wasn’t actually used to display the page, which can help reduce time your users spend waiting for the page to download and display.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Yahoo offers a similar tool for Firefox called YSlow, which is also meant to help developers streamline their websites.

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This morning, Google announced two enhancements to their OpenID API. For end users, they have rolled out a popup-style interface for simpler logins with fewer redirects and less confusion. They also extended their Attribute Exchange to include more user data, such as first and last names, preferred language, country, and other, more personal information available via the Google Data API.

At the OpenID blog, David Recordon wrote this morning, “This means that Google users signing into sites… now have a much better user experience, one on par with Facebook Connect.” The screenshots below show the new login in action.

Sponsor

According to this morning’s entry from Yariv Adan on the Google Code Blog, the new UI “is designed to streamline the federated login experience for users. Specifically, it’s designed to ensure that the context of the Relying Party website is always available and visible, even in the extreme case where a confused user closes the Google approval window.”

The post continues with a specific use case. OpenID products company JanRain is using the new API in their RPX offering. The first step on the login page “is identical to that of the ‘full page’ version, and does not require any changes in the Relying Party UI,” read the blog.”

In addition to signing into sites using their Google accounts, users are also sharing specific data with the Relying Party website. The data shared can range from the user’s email, first and last name, preferred language, and country, to other information available through the Google Data API, including the user’s Contacts List, Web Albums, or Calendar.

Adan writes, “Google strongly believes that the data our users trust us with belongs to them and should always be available for them to use. By providing users with more secure means to share their data, they can benefit from a much more streamlined, personalized and socially relevant experience when they log in to trusted websites.”

The new process also allows a streamlined conversion process for Relying Party websites.

Discuss

Google is now making it easier for Websites to surface Friend Connect features with what it is calling the Social Bar. This is a toolbar that Websites can add to their homepage or any other page they wish, and then they can add links for drop-down gadgets that lets site visitors do things such as sign in via Friend Connect, see who else has signed in recently, check out comments, or site members, all from Social Bar. Here is an example.

Basically, the social bar is a small strip that webmasters can layer on top of any web page, either at the top or at the bottom. That way, website visitors are provided with a bit of information, and the bar also lets them interact with any social feature the site incorporates through drop-down gadgets. As Software Engineer Christopher Wren explains in the announcement blog post, this is a good way to save on pixel space and keep putting the actual content of the site forward first.

Here are some of the gadgets Websites can include in the Social Bar, from Google’s brand new Social Web blog:

• On the far left, visitors can join your site, see their identity, and edit their profiles and settings.
• Your visitors can also delve into your site’s activity stream to see what’s happening throughout your site. It includes links to recent posts made anywhere on your site, helping other visitors quickly find where the hottest conversations are taking place.
• The wall gadget can host a discussion for the whole site, a section of pages, or each individual page, letting your visitors easily read and leave comments.
• Lastly, visitors can see the other members of your site, check out their profiles to see how like-minded they really are, and even become friends.

The toolbar approach is both an attempt at ubiquity and invisibility at the same time. Google wants Friend Connect to be everywhere, but at the same time it doesn’t want to seem too pushy about being everywhere. Hence, the seemingly innocuous toolbar. But that toolbar expands with pop-down gadgets, which takes advantage of Google’s strengths with creating gadgets in iGoogle and elsewhere. Can a Facebook Connect toolbar be far behind?

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Picasa, the popular free photo management software made by Google, has finally made its way to the Mac. The application has long been noticeably absent on the Macintosh – especially given the fact that it has been available for Linux (which typically lags behind Macs and Windows) since 2006. It’s also a direct competitor to Apple’s long running iPhoto product, which has come with all new Macs for years. So how does it stack up?

In my brief testing the application seems to be very snappy (much faster than iPhoto), though it lacks the sleek look of Apple’s products. Photos import quickly, effects are easy to find and apply, and most things are intuitive, though the folder browsing can be a little confusing. It might not be as pretty as iPhoto, but I won’t be surprised if power-users make the switch (or at least consider it).

One of the biggest differences between Picasa and iPhoto is that Picasa doesn’t move or reorganize images, but instead keeps track of where your images are scattered across your hard drive and allows you to view them in one place. For users that manually manage their photos by sorting them into folders, this is a very welcome change. In contrast, iPhoto has long transfered your photos to its own library, and encouraged users to sort their photos through the app itself.

Given that iPhoto has come preinstalled on every Mac for years, Google is doing doing everything it can to make Picasa play nice with your existing library. While users can typically modify any image on their hard drive directly from Picasa, all images in iPhoto’s library are treated differently: the application will copy these images to a new location, and only then apply edits. The application also allows users to revert back to previous versions.

Picasa is a welcome alternative to iPhoto, but it’s still premature to drop iPhoto entirely. It’s highly likely that Apple will unveil a new version of iPhoto at tomorrow’s Macworld keynote, and you can be sure that it will include some significant enhancements.

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Google’s universal sign-in system, Friend Connect, which just opened to all Websites two weeks ago, now accepts Twitter IDs as a sign-in option. That means when you visit a participating Website that accepts Friend Connect as a log-in option, you can sign in using your Twitter account. If any of the people you follow on Twitter are also members of the third-party site, they will automatically be added as your friends.

Friend Connect also supports IDs from Google, Yahoo, AIM, and OpenID. For instance, I tried this on the Go2Web2.0 blog, which has implemented Friend Connect, and it gave me the option to use my Gmail or Twitter accounts (I could also use Orkut or Plaxo). I used my Twitter sign-in without a hitch. (Update: Actually, this is a little confusing, but it signs you in first using one of the four credentials above and then asks you if you want to add Twitter).

The race is on between Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, and MySpaceID to sign up the most third party sites. Adding Twitter as an issuing party is a big win for Friend Connect because sites are going to choose the sign-in system that gives their visitors the most options and broadest reach.

There is nothing stopping sites from implementing more than one sign-in system, but at some point presenting visitors with too many options becomes confusing. For instance, we use Facebook Connect, in addition to our own sign-in system. Should we add Friend Connect? Probably. MySpaceID?

It’s only been a couple weeks since these have become widely available, and already universal sign-in is anything but. Here is a list of sites that are live with Facebook Connect, and some example Friend Connect sites can be found here (if anyone has a more comprehensive list of sites live with Friend Connect, please add to comments).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The first Android phone is dropping next week, and the people who pick it up will be toting around mobile Google software in their pocket wherever they go. They’ll be using mobile Google apps, probably in concert with using Gmail, Gcal and Google Maps on their normal computer. We know that Google is tossing out all user data after 9 months, but you’ve got to wonder what kind of a picture Google is getting of its heavy users like that when it’s only getting info from how its apps are used. After the jump, an imagined day in the life of a Google user, as recorded and perceived by the Googleplex itself.

07:36:04: Application — Gmail
User reads 1 new emails
Keywords: dinner, match.com, reply, date

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male/Female

07:43:38: Application — Search
Search Term: italian restaurant upper east side manhattan
Search Term: italian restaurant upper east side manhattan cheap
Search Term: creampies

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker

08:31:17: Application — Gmail
User sends 1 new email
Keywords: dinner, meet, Ford Fiesta

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income

08:40:03: Application — Search
Search Term: vern troyer sex tape

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist

11:01:12: Application — Google Reader
Feed read: Gizmodo
Feed read: Kotaku
Feed read: Cute Overload
Feed read: Gothamist
Feed read: Gizmodo
Feed read: Kottke
Feed read: Boing Boing
Feed read: Fleshbot

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller

12:14:30: Application — Google Maps Mobile
Search Term: SuperCuts
Near: Current Location

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate

12:59:08: Application — Mobile Search
Search Term: slimming pants

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate, Insecure

13:01:56: Application — Google Maps Mobile
Search Term: H&M
Near: Current Location

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate, Insecure, Trendy

13:42:12: Application — Google Maps Mobile
Search Term: Florist
Near: Current Location

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate, Insecure, Trendy, Unimaginative

14:19:31: Application — Search
Search Term: dating tips
Search Term: first dates
Search Term: halitosis cure
Search Term: bang bus

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate, Insecure, Trendy, Unimaginative, Virgin

14:55:00: Application — GCal
Reminder: Sales Meeting in Five Minutes Sent via: Text

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate, Insecure, Trendy, Unimaginative, Virgin, Boring Job Holder

17:13:49: Application — Google Reader
Feed read: Gizmodo
Feed read: Fleshbot

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate, Insecure, Trendy, Unimaginative, Virgin, Boring Job Holder, Porn Addict

18:51:10: Application — Google Maps Mobile
Start Location: Current Location
End Location: Olive Garden

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate, Insecure, Trendy, Unimaginative, Virgin, Boring Job Holder, Porn Addict, Fat, Not Italian

19:15:03: Application — Mobile Gmail
User sends 1 new email
Keywords: date, forgot, still here

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate, Insecure, Trendy, Unimaginative, Virgin, Boring Job Holder, Porn Addict, Fat, Not Italian, Pathetic

19:20:41: Application — Mobile Gmail
User reads 0 new emails

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate, Insecure, Trendy, Unimaginative, Virgin, Porn Addict, Fat, Not Italian, So Pathetic

19:26:11: Application — Mobile Gmail
User reads 0 new emails

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate, Insecure, Trendy, Unimaginative, Virgin, Porn Addict, Fat, Not Italian, So Pathetic, Desperate

19:31:55: Application — Mobile Gmail
User reads 0 new emails

Current Demographic Profile: Single Male New Yorker, Low Income, Midget Fetishist, Cubicle Dweller, Cheapskate, Insecure, Trendy, Unimaginative, Virgin, Porn Addict, Fat, Not Italian, So Pathetic, So Desperate

19:40:21: Application — Google Maps Mobile
Search Term: Strip Club
Near: Current Location

Current Demographic Profile: Benny Goldman

Yahoo is a pioneer of the Web 2.0 giants. In an industry where blogs, organizations, press, and companies just talk about the possibilities and the urge of opening up – Yahoo is the only major Internet company that really experiments with these new standards. Whereas dozens of companies take small symbolical steps, Yahoo just talks in terms of leaps. After embracing OpenID, the Sunnyvale-based company now opens up its search platform to third parties with the launch of BOSS (Build your Own Search Service).

How to get back at Google

Although they state their goal is to “foster innovation in the search landscape“, we all know it’s a daring strategy to win back some terrain on Google. The big G has over 68 percent of the search market and is often called THE leader in search. Somehow, they keep on strengthening this position and it seems like they’ll never give this no. 1 position away. The Yahoo executives have realized this, and now take a different road to search success. I can’t say it better than Marshall Kirckpatrick from ReadWriteWeb, who stated that Yahoo “attacks Google with an army of verticals” – referring to the vertical search engines who will use the index of Yahoo to offer specified results for niches.

The revenge of the alts

These vertical engines now suffer from a lack of indexed sites – as it’s nearly impossible to create an index of the relevant parts of whole web. Yahoo has accomplished this, and now makes it possible for these alternative search engines to focus on the product, not the technology. As Yahoo will offer the folllowing features:

Ability to re-rank and blend results – BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
Total flexibility on presentation – Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon
Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

With this, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales sees the prediction he told me in January becoming reality: “Good quality search is becoming a commodity item. The search quality of Google, Yahoo and Ask are actually very similar. So the idea that Google is some kind of technological powerhouse, is actually not longer true.”

See some examples of BOSS at Hakia and Me.dium.

Clickpass, a startup that has simplified the OpenID login platform, has built out support for additional third parties that brings the promise of a universal login even closer. Users will now be able to use their Google, Facebook, Yahoo, or Hotmail passwords on any site that includes the Clickpass authentication system.

The new Clickpass system requires almost no effort from the end user. Supported sites simply embed a button on their login page which prompts users to login with their credentials from one of the aforementioned services; you don’t even need to have a Clickpass account. On supported sites, creating a new account is as simple as logging in with your preferred service (I use Gmail), and picking a display name to show other users. This is what OpenID should be.

So what’s the catch? At launch the service only works on a handful of sites, but CEO Peter Nixey says that implementing it on a website is easy – we can expect to see the number of supported sites skyrocket in the next few days. Developers need only implement the standard OpenID protocol along with the Clickpass system and they’re good to go.

One problem that Clickpass will soon face is that it is really a temporary solution to a problem most of these companies are already working on. We can expect Google, Yahoo, and the rest of the lot to implement their own version of OpenID, which will effectively take Clickpass out of the equation.

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