Ramblings

I’ve been a Google Voice user for a while and now you can join the ranks without an invitation.

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required. […]

I personally love the service. I have the voicemail from my iPhone forwarded to Google Voice so that all my voicemail is in one place (and I can get them as text messages). The Google Voice number is the only one I give out any more since it is trivial to screen calls, block numbers from ever calling you again, and generally masking where you are (one number can connect to many phones) at any given point.

I’m not big into typography and I don’t usually use more than a baseline sans-serif font for my sites as a result. However, there’s been a big push in the last few months to get “real” fonts out on the web and usable by websites. Typekit and a few others have been offering services for a while now that allow you to use licensed fonts on your website. Google has now jumped into fray with a collection of completely free fonts and their own distribution method. It looks pretty simple to use. Very simple, actually. Go check it out if that’s your thing.

(Typekit is on board with it and sounds somewhat excited to see Google join in.)

Google’s long-awaited open-sourcing of the VP8 video codec has finally happened and both Mozilla and Opera are on board with it. The new codec and container combine decent quality with open source licensing and royalty freedom. Might this be enough to topple H.264 as the Web video codec of choice? […]

Glad to see Google, et. al., making strong moves to ensure that the preferred video format for the Web is open and free. It was refreshing to see Adobe even signed on and will support the codec inside Flash.