I recently discovered that Grand Central has the capability to use Gizmo numbers as phone numbers. All of a sudden, you can have a PSTN number that connects to your computer. For the uninitiated, PSTN stands for Public Switched Telephone Network. This is the phone network that all companies connect to so you can call your family. Obviously you wouldn’t call your friends on this, as you can IM them or use a VOIP program like Google Talk or Gizmo that lets you talk just like you were using a phone. Gizmo, in addition to being a voice chat program and IM program, uses a “fake” phone number. It looks like the normal 10 digits, but I don’t think you can call it directly. However, Gizmo’s partner project Sipphone, will sell you a number that is accessible from the PSTN. Anybody using a normal phone can call this number and connect to the Gizmo program running on your computer. To you it looks like voice chat, but to whoever is calling you, it is a normal phone call. Grand Central provides a “follow-me” service. They give you a phone number (on the PSTN), that anybody can call. On Grand Central’s site, you add additional phone numbers. Typically these are PSTN numbers, like your cell phone, or home phone. However you can now add your Gizmo phone number. You then set up rules so that anybody calling your Grand Central number will ring through to any or all of the additional numbers you set up. All of a sudden, you can redirect all calls to your computer if you are sitting there, or all calls to your cell if you are traveling. Your friends and family always call the same number, and you tell the Grand Central software how to connect to you. Back in the 1990’s, I remember that Sprint or MCI offered something like this, but now you can get it for free.

I have been thinking about the “network effect”. Developments this spring with Flickr have made it a less desirable website to host pictures. In the meantime, one of my brothers signed up, then showed up as a “buddy” when I logged in. One little thing like that made Flickr more desirable then when I was using it by myself. Now if I move, I have to consider getting my brother to move to, and frankly, I’m not even interested in his pictures. This article from the NY Times goes off in a slightly different direction. What happens when early adopters pick a direction? Although it is considered somewhat unpredictable, the possibility exists that those early adopters can pull a market in their direction. This article was about music, but examples such as websites or software to use (Facebook anyone), what cell phone company you use (Verizon in my case), or what brand names are purchased can be affected by a relatively small group of people.

The longer you are online, the more bookmarks you can accumulate. Using sites like del.icio.us makes it even worse. Although I don’t have enough ambition to really clean up my bookmarks (it’s hard for me to throw some away), I have recently searched for software to help me out. For browser-based bookmarks (IE, Firefox, Opera), AM-Deadlink works really well. It asked me where my bookmarks were loaded for Firefox and it quickly weeded out my dead links and duplicate links. For del.icio.us, I needed something else. A quick search led me to Fresh Del.icio.us. All it required was a current JVM. I downloaded the zip file and extracted the lib directory and jar file. Upon starting, the program asked for my name and password for del.icio.us, then quickly weeded out dead and duplicate entries online. That takes care of what software can do right now. The reason I use del.icio.us in the first place is the tagging support. Although it’s still easier to wrap my brain around the folder concept of organization, tags make a lot of sense for something like a bookmark categorization. Obviously a site like IBM could fit into a bunch of categories such as hardware, software, services, etc. My company does a lot of business with IBM so I have a lot of links into their site. Software links could be tagged as ‘OS’ as well as ‘Security’. It quickly becomes hard to make a folder hierarchy that fits the possible multiple category choices, thus tags win the day.