Tech Week in Review: 3 Things You Shouldn’t Have Missed

A lot of cool things happened this week in technology, but there are 3 that specifically caught my eye, so I’d like to share them with you and basically give you the rundown as to how they might affect you.

Google Voice

Google bought Grand Central over a year ago. They have been working on migrating the service over to their own services and pretty much tweaking it since then. This week, they relaunched the service as Google Voice and it looks very promising (tc).

A few features that seem pretty hot:

• You get one phone number that redirects your calls between all your other phone numbers based on criteria you set.
• Voicemail’s are automatically transcribed so you can read them instead of listening to them. I hate voicemail, so I’m pretty excited about this feature.
• You can even receive text messages via your Google Voice phone number, so you no longer have to share you real mobile number with everyone.
• It’s Free.

Google Voice is currently only available for Grand Central customers, but their site says they’ll be opening up soon for the public. I also heard that they may be integrating the Google Voice interface with your Gmail, which would be awesome for boosting productivity: Email, Voicemail, Text Message, etc. all in one place.

Facebook’s New Interface

In an up-hill battle to swagger jack FriendFeed and Twitter, Facebook has implemented some new features and changed up their interface.

There is a box at the top to set your status and share media (photos, video, audio, etc.). The page doesn’t seem to actually refresh in real-time, but I’m sure this is coming. There are options along the side to filter the stream so you don’t miss anything.

The buzz in the community is that Facebook is trying to compete with Twitter and Facebook, but I don’t think biting  a few features is going to have anyone cutting off their Tweets or shutting down their FriendFeed account. Even with Facebook’s UI mimicking these services, it still comes down to what’s under the hood.

Google Reader Comments

Social media is all about the conversation, so whenever a service adds the ability to comment, there is a lot of discussion about it. Google Reader recently announced the ability to comment on items you’re subscribed to. As pointed out on Mashable, this actually “provides a disincentive to actually visit the website to share your thoughts.”

Why visit the blog when you can comment right inside your feed reader? They’re still working out the kinks with the interface, but it will be very interesting to see how this plays out as much of the blogging world doesn’t take kindly to discussion fragmentation and comment “theft”.