Google Voice is terrific; it’s now run by Google–of course it’s totally awesome. Well, not totally.. As envisioned by its creators, the Grand Central team, the service was to be a single place to view all sorts of messages: voice, texts, emails (even though email addresses were of the format “phone number @grandcentral…..” ).
Now that it’s run by Google, which has a wildly popular email system, you would think the integration with email would be true and full…. but ney. The Google Voice web inbox shows voice and text threads, but no emails. Click “Contacts” which is the very same list of Contacts from your Gmail account, and you will see no link to view “conversations” — what Google terms email threads.
More surprising, there is no link to view past text threads or voice happenings. There are no links except to Edit the contact’s settings. Interesting.
On the flip side, from Gmail, in your contacts, there is a link to view past conversations, but despite being a Google Voice subscriber (not all Google users are), there is no link to any voice/SMS history from the Contact detail—but there is a link to the email conversation threads.
Despite its capacity to do so, Google has not fulfilled the original vision for a Grand Central communication hub. It could rectify this by offering a Contacts view that is truly singular, with the same history links as accessed from either Gmail or from Google Voice. It’s a very simple concept, “cross-referencing.” Users should be able to see the full history of her communications with a contact, with a simple click.
In addition to a common Contact interface, Google could offer those users who use both Voice and Gmail the ability to view a “super” Inbox which shows all sorts of messages, which can be filtered and sorted by contact and by communciation type (i.e. “show me only text messages from Family”). As tempting as it is to declare Google most-high; alone in the world as both righteous and awesome, the shortcomings of Voice require us to hold off on that pronouncement. There’s work to be done.
