I wrote before about the Mobile Messenger scam
. One more thing. T-Mobile told me that they would block the astrological text message spam that Mobile Messenger was sending—and that T-Mobile was charging me for. They told me that they were going to refund the money and I have seen no sign of that. I can see no reason to trust these people and I am about to go on one of my social media rampages to out these people. If what they do to make this right does not work, I will do just that.
One other thing. After they blocked the spams, my sidekick no longer worked. It gets no signal. Now, I don’t know about you, but I do not believe in coincidences. I have a very strong suspicion that whatever they did is what caused the breakdown. Now they want to sell me another cell and told me that I could get a good deal. How nice of them. I cannot get over the notion that they are trying to play me once again. If anyone can come up with a potential technical reason for believing that their block caused the problem, email me at bookmarc1947@live.com. Then I can assure you that I will get in their faces.
I need a cell and I do not want to get trapped in a new contract, but I also do not want to do business with a company that engages in this kind of behavior. I guess I will have to think it through some more.
I took a long look at Gizmo5 this morning. They have a new version out that seems to largely designed to improve the sound quality of calls made through Google Voice. Even at this early stage a combination of Gizmo5 and Voice gives you a 21st Century telephone system. You can set Skype up to do pretty much the same thing, but only by adding various subscriptions and add-ons. At this point, the Google system is pretty much free—and a lot easier to set up. You can forward calls pretty much everywhere, record them, get voicemails and texts by email, make video calls and a whole bunch of other things, too many to mention.
The irony, as I mentioned before, is that Gizmo was the first VOIP system I used to create an online office. I switched to Skype because, at the time, it had features Gizmo did not have. I built my business telephone system, when I went freelance, using a Skype call-in number.
Then Google Voice came out. Looking at it, I was able to determine that they were buying Gizmo. They did just that—and suspended the option of making a new Gizmo account. Since I already had an old account, I was able to keep up with them and where they are going with telephone systems. I have to wonder how many other bewildered geeks there are out there who are signed up for both of these services. It will be interesting when the final product emerges from this chaos of new features.
If you are registered with Google, have you seen the IGoogle page? It is kind of like your own personal search and gimmick page where they find out what interests you. It offers all kinds of options, gimmicks, free software and so on with a very annoying background of what sounds like hold music.
Google is getting to be a little like religion. You look at this blooming, buzzing world of infinite complexity and try to convince yourself that there is a grand plan behind all of it. I guess I should mute my speakers and try harder.
You will undoubtedly remember what I said about Esquire, Outdoor, Men’s Journal and ESPN doing business with known scammer. It turns out that they are not the only major amoral corporations. Take a look at this saved search regarding T-Mobile.
I called them to complain about my bill and some ridiculous text message spam I was receiving. I kept getting these updates about the current status of us Cancers. Anybody who knows me would probably know that my interest in astrology scores about a minus five on a scale of ten. It turns out that T-Mobile was charging me about ten bucks a month for this BS. Their customer service people did the Pontius Pilate act that I have become familiar with in talking to the magazine companies who were sending me magazines I did not want and had not ordered. Apparently, even though I was able to run down Jason W. Ellsworth and his shell companies with a few Google searches, and found a ten-year history of the same nonsense, the corporations doing business with them are totally innocent.
T-Mobile apparently does not know that Mobile Messenger, a California company they do business with has a track record with angry consumers. Take a look at this.
The real joke is that they told me that I got signed up for this because I was looking for a “crush”. Here is their site. Uh, do not post any information there. I am sure, once again, that anyone who knows me even marginally would find it hard to believe that I am looking for Miss Kitty. If it did not piss me off royally, I might even find that funny.
Apparently, T-Mobile is not alone. A whole bunch of large cell providers seem to do business with companies like this. Here is another saved search. I found this article particularly interesting. Note that she mentions Mobile Messenger as one of the scammers.
They are currently falling all over themselves to refund all of the money and get me on the telephone to show how nice they are. Shall we say that my reputation precedes me? Apparently this gentleman wants to talk to me. Interesting that he failed to mention that he is a lawyer—their general counsel and a VP, to boot.
Well, Mr. Alan Daniel Sege, you are welcome to talk to me, but, as far as I know, the truth is not actionable. I do believe, however, that charging people for services they do not want and have not signed up for is a tad over the line. I would suggest that you overnight that refund. Other than that, I suggest that you stay as far away from me as you can.
I would suggest that the rest of you check your cell bills and make sure that you are not being scammed.
Funny, Alan D. Sege is beginning to sound like Jason W. Ellsworth.
Back to my usual stuff. I just found out about a new Google service—Google Wave. I asked for an invite to it and I am pretty sure that I will be accepted, given my track record with Google Voice. I am betting that they even know that I blog about their stuff, on occasion.
They have gone in so many different directions—just look at the list of sites and services they own—or are starting. They are going into competition with just about every big player out there—Microsoft, Adobe, Skype, all the music sites and so on. They have their own browser—and it is pretty good. I love Google Voice, which is nothing less, potentially, than the phone system of the future that will eventually mean dropping all the outmoded wire and hardware and created much more sophisticated systems.
Wave is yet another one. Several big companies have gone into competition for the online office, spaces for collaboration, communication and file sharing. As many of you likely know, I have spent much of the past ten years designing and managing online offices, generally using FirstClass as a platform. I have experimented with the services provided by Adobe and Microsoft along these lines.
I currently work freelance and I can see the advantage of developing collaboration spaces with some of my contacts at various clients, since most of my projects, in one way or another, involve frequently updated content and social media of one kind or another. Speaking as one who managed a system of some 2000 forums and numerous blogs, video and picture galleries and so on on eight large sites scattered across the country, I can tell you that it is a 7-24 proposition and the prospect of having to get face to face with the people you work with by travelling out to see them is pretty much impossible when they are located from New Jersey to Oregon. It is not that easy when they all live in my home state, NJ, unless we are face to face on Skype or Gizmo. I really could find a good use for an online office—except for one thing.
I am wondering what, if anything, Google has done to address this problem, if anything. I can tell you from bitter experience that it is difficult to get professionals to join you in the collaboration space unless they work for you—and the older they are, the harder it gets. The thing is that the people I work with, anyway, just do not understand what I am talking about and what the possibilities of an online office are. The few that you get to join don’t look in often enough to make real collaboration workable.
It is yet another example of the age divide in the digital world. As it happens, most of the people I deal with are, at least, over forty. Few are on Skype, Facebook or Twitter. They use email, but that is about it for most of them. And, as imaginative as I might be regarding the potential uses of a virtual office, particularly for a small business, it is damned hard to collaborate when you don’t have anyone to collaborate with.
One thing I see is making the process of including others in the collaboration space as easy as possible, when they are invited by a space manager—and making it easy to set up demos of how they can use the various services available tailored to the job at hand. One thing that I think would help would be to have a VOIP service like Skype or Gizmo integrated into the collaboration site. I have always had to build this myself. I actually started out with Gizmo, years back, and moved to Skype so that I could use the video calls to verify who was actually doing the work. Believe it or not, this can be a serious issue when you have homebound workers on SSI and SSDI who may sign on as a working husband or wife to keep from losing their benefits. Since I assume that they are about ready to move on with Google Voice with an embedded VOIP phone system, it should be easy to have a contact list that will initiate a call to a collaborator with a mouse click. It would also be good to be able to initiate group calls easily. It should also be possible to transfer calls to other workers, just like in a real office.
The trouble is that you would have a hard day’s march to find someone like me—someone who is accustomed to running this kind of operation and crazy enough to take it on. I am sure that the kids will adapt to this kind of thing pretty quickly, but they will be about using it initially, not managing it. I personally think that a whole lot of work will be done this way in the future, but not the near future. For one thing, just think about the difference in cost between building an office for thirty people with telephones, bathrooms, vending machines and all the rest of it—and setting up an online space where they can effectively work from home. The incentive is there, my friends.
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