Google posted about Google Voice yesterday with a little video.  It took them awhile to get GrandCentral (a company they bought in 2007) to be up to what some of the Unified Communications companies already out there had going for them.  Google does have the power now to do more, to tie it to Android phones nicely to enhance their Goog-411 service, but do they really have a better system in the end?

My experience in Unified Messaging isn’t limited, I’ve been using uReach.com for about 9 years now.  I even worked for uReach Technologies (their parent company) for about 5 years and Lucent Technologies for almost 2 years so I know first hand what goes on behind the dial tone.  I already requested an invite to Google Voice;  I suggest you request one too and see where they take the UC.

Something went wrong with Chrome!

Google Moderator is place for you to ask questions.  Will it become the next big thing?  I’m not feeling it yet, but check it out on your own.  Here’s my Question about JavaScript Libraries.

With the latest launch of Google Chromium for OS X and Linux by CodeWeavers, I thought I should jump into why Google Chrome isn’t exactly worth all the hype, yet.  I’m not anti Google, I actually enjoy many of their products, I use gmail, I search with google, I use adwords and adsense, google docs, calendar, gears, etc…  But like many of their products (and yes many other companies are in the same boat too) they aren’t perfect yet, and lack a certain number of features; and still contain bugs.

First off, I need to admit that I won’t switch fully over to Chrome until I get a few features that make my life easier.  I need extensions, I need my del.icio.us buttons.  I hate bookmarks, and having to copy and paste things into del.icio.us is annoying.  One other main thing I think is lacking, is that you can’t drag a link to an existing tab.  This is a feature that IE 8 is also lacking and it completely annoys me.  It’s not as if the feature is overriding an existing feature or is somehow made easier by another one.

Also Chrome doesn’t render certain things properly that which of course have plagued Safari in the past.  An example is bmwusa.com, which has a current issue with certain flash elements being properly rendered in Safari and now the same for Chrome which relies on the WebKit Engine.  Having webkit as the basis will only serve to compound issues that plague Safari and force developers to spend even more time on niche browsers.

This leads me to my final point that as a Web Developer Google being the behemoth it is will now force developers to make sure that Chrome is in their list of browsers when they QA.  When you have a limited amount of time and limited resources, it is quiet common to drop certain browsers from QA, such as Opera and Safari 2, since their market share is often quite low.  Granted this is sometimes not the case if you know your audience or are forced by client standards or clients with Mac fetishes.  But at any rate, make sure you check out Google’s Chrome FAQ for Web Developers.

Not really an issue, but important to note are the JavaScript issues that John Resig has found with Chrome.