For the last few mornings, I've gone running by/into the Snake River Canyon. It's been great! I had been thinking about going running in the mornings to stay fit and it's a pretty good stress reliever too. I never have really been much of a fan of running, though I was in cross-country in Junior High. But, thinking about that, combined with my brother-in-law Jacob Sybrowski giving me all kinds of grief about how he's going to live 15 years longer because he's eating healthy and exercising regularly, made me get started. It's been great, and having the Canyon to run into has been awesome. It's a beautiful view! You may or may not recall how before my mission I was extremely into the goings-on of Google. I wrote a blog regularly (for a year maybe?) on the new things Google was doing (I was the first major Google Blogger to post about Google buying out YouTube, my ratings sky rocketed that day!). Well, yesterday was the first day that I really looked around the Google goings-on again, just out of curiosity, and it shocked me what I found!
Google Voice is a new product that Google is putting out which is basically e-mail for phone. There are several awesome features (all of which are displayed in fun animations on the Google Voice YouTube page). These features include: Voicemail Transcription, One number for all your phones (and you can make settings depending on who's calling to where the call will be connected to (i.e. home, cell, work, or all... OR NONE if you don't like that person ;D)), Personalized Greetings (so you can do one voicemail message that's you rocking out to a song or something for your friends, and then a more professional one for your boss ;D), International calls for $0.02 a minute!, texting through e-mail (it will appear to your friend like it's coming from your phone), share voicemails, block callers, screen callers, Mobile App, and simple Conference Calling. All-in-all, it's pretty amazing what it can do. Currently, it's on an invite basis only. If anyone reading this has a Google Voice account and has the option to invite a friend like the beginnings of Gmail, I would love an invite! I've applied for one! (Yes, you may call me a nerd...)
Google Wave is so incredible it's hard to describe. In face, the video they have for it is an hour and a half long! (So I haven't even scratched the surface of what it can do). Essentially it will likely change the way that we communicate from e-mail, to texting, to collaborating on any kind of project, to blogging, to just about anything. It's pretty amazing what it can do. If I understand it right, it's mostly meant for live conversations between more than two people (though two people can do it themselves as well.) It's pretty convenient when planning a trip with a lot of people, or working on a project. Because there's a lot to it, and it's also pretty new, I haven't really had opportunity to look at it much quite yet, but I've applied for an invitation to this as well and hopefully I can get into it because it looks pretty amazing.
Picnik.com is an online photo/image editor that has highly sophisticated features and combine that with Google Chrome as an extension and all of a sudden you have a really useful tool for editing and sharing photos and images on blogs and social networks (like Facebook). It's pretty amazing what online technology can do now! You forget that you're even on the internet. At the rate we're going it will be pretty incredible where we are technology-wise in 10 years from now! Let's hope that we don't forget how to place a normal call and actually talk to a person. And that we go out and do something social and active with our family and friends! There are definitely some pretty amazing pieces of technology out there, but none of them compares in value to actual communication and real (not Facebook) friendship! And that's the Bright-side of life! :-D
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