Text Any Phone (FREE) Without A Mobile Phone

A valuable if unheralded feature of Google Voice is its ability to send and receive sms text messages through a webpage (though not MMS picture/video messages at this time) or even using email.

This can be especially valuable for:

• Family members (grandma?) who email & want to stay connected with the family, but do not want/like hassle of texting on a cell phone. This can be great for keeping someone in the loop when group-texting or using a group texting app like GroupMe or Beluga or kik or others.
• If you go overseas and want to keep a/your "home" mobile number for people to text you without incurring international charges.
• Anyone who does not have/want the additional charges of a cell phone plan/hardware.
• Anyone who would rather send/receive texts using a real keyboard, not your thumbs.
• If you run a small business or some other function where texting would be valuable, but you don’t want to give out your cell phone number.
• If you don’t have unlimited texting (or don’t want to spend money for texting) on your cell phone.

How to Set Up:

1. Get a Google Voice number. You can easily sign up at http://google.com/voice. If you already have a Google account, just enter your password and accept the terms. If you don’t have a Google account (what rock do you live under?), set one up.
2. Google Voice will walk you through selecting a number. Easy-peasy.
3. OPTIONAL: If you want to port your existing mobile number to Google Voice, its $20 clams, but then you’re set.
4. You will have to validate at least ONE real-life phone before you can activate your Google Voice account.  This is simple, and Google will walk you through it.
5. In options, choose to have Google Voice forward SMS messages to your email address.
   
6. Test by sending a text message to your Google Voice number, and then checking your email account.

How to Use:

There are three ways to texting with Google Voice:

• First, have Google Voice forward SMS messages to your mobile phone (if you have one). Then simply reply to the texts you receive and you’re in the conversation!
• Second, send and reply to texts online at http://voice.google.com. This works similar to an email inbox. Just click on the text message you want to reply to, type in the box, and send!
• Third, if you enabled "forward SMS messages to my email" in your Google Voice settings, then SMS messages will show up in your email box.  To reply to them, simply REPLY to the email and send! *

Quick Tips:

• Going overseas? You may be blocked from creating a Google Voice account if you’re already away from the US. Create your account before you go!
• Save the specially-crafted email address you get from your friends’ texts in your address book for quick messaging!
• Google Voice does NOT currently support sending or receiving MMS/media or picture/video messages. There is no error message to the sender if they try to send you one either… they just get dropped like yesterday’s newspaper.
• Remember, text messages are normally only 160 characters long. In your email program, you can get a little carried away.  Don’t type a book… if you need to communicate THAT much information, send them an ACTUAL email!
• Get the APP: If you have an android-based phone, jump to the marketplace and grab the Google Voice app. This operates wholly over WIFI/cellular connection wherever you are and sends texts using data (not "texts" or minutes).
• Get the mobile web: If your mobile device (iphone, ipad, PalmOS, blackberry, etc) does not happen to have access to Google Voice apps, jump to voice.google.com in your mobile browser, and be pleased to discover a full-featured web environment ready for your data-friendly consumption. Again, this uses DATA (wifi or cellular, etc) and not texts/minutes from your carrier.

Wishlist: Google Voice to Manage All My Messaging

I love Google Voice integration on the android. Though MMS messaging is still lacking, the feature-set pretty much rocks.

So, what is my wish? For Google Voice to be smart enough to manage all my messaging, not just the ones inbound to my GVoice number.

It would be awesome to have one app to text/call from (and, sync with voice.google.com so I can text/call online, too) and have it be smart enough to know what phone number to display to the recipient.

If the application took my inbound calls and texts from people calling/texting my normal cell number, receive them in Google Voice (and sync with my online account, too) and let me answer, collect voicemail, or receive/reply to texts either on my phone or online or have them bounce to another phone in my GoogleVoice settings.

WIN: This would ease the transition from people needing to tell everyone their new Google Voice number when they want to begin switching to the one-inbox goodness that is GV.   Just install the app on your phone, connect to your Google Account and suddenly your phone and online accounts are connected easily and seamlessly!

WIN: This would tie people into their Google Accounts even more, encouraging calls from gMail and other online conversations to happen without people being tied to their phones.

Bonus: Have Google Voice insert a signature at the end of texts to someone’s handset number that says “Try calls/texts to my GoogleVoice number: 111-222-3333 http://voice.google.com”

Disqus Mobile Apps for Moderators

Disqus (pronounced: "Discuss") launched their mobile apps for comment moderators, allowing for comments to be read/deleted/approved or "spammed" on the fly by site owners.

From their blog:

Features:

• Approving, marking spam, and deleting content
• Filtering by status
• Background notifications
• Search
• Reply
• View Context

The Android version is already out in the marketplace (scan the QRcode below/at right for easy access). And, in a nice turn of events, the Apple iPhone version is not currently available (what? Android being developed first?) though it will be out soon.

WebOS users, don’t fret. A handy app for your Palm Pre, Pixi is coming soon as well.

What’s next? Well, moderating is really nice from the app interface (I had some difficulty logging in through the web interface to my own blog to comment from my Droid Eris today*), but as others called out, it would be nice to see all comments to-be-moderated not just per-site.

Also, just a tip to the Disqus team, if you push out a version of this for commenters (not just moderators… as people have requested in the Android Market) and let people reply to (and engage in) conversations on blogs they already use via Disqus, you could single-handedly become the interface to which people interact with their favorite blogs online!

*Logging in was buggy on my Android browser. I wish you could route me through twitter oAuth, my Google account or OpenID or something easy like that rather than making me remember (another) password.

Disqus Amongst Yuhselves below