Is Your Site Slow? Google Launches Tool to Help You Fix That
Google is obsessed with speed and efficiency. What other company would care so much about performance that it would create a super-minimalist homepage, build its own Web-centric operating system and also revamp its search algorithms?
Now Google is bringing its obsession with speed to the masses by launching a new tool to help Web site owners improve the loading time of their sites. Google Site Performance, now available as part of Webmaster Tools Labs, analyzes your Web site and provides data on the average load time, graphs out how your site has improved or slowed down over time, generates reports on specific pages, and, best of all, offers suggestions for speeding up your Web site.
The last piece is the most important. Google derives revenue from advertising, and as we’ve explained before, the more you’re on the Web, the better for Google. Slow-loading pages, however, delay you from viewing or clicking on a Google ad, affecting revenues.
Sometime soon, Google Search may incorporate site speed into its rankings. It would only make sense to have a tool like this to prepare Web site owners for that addition. The tool itself is simple, but we shouldn’t forget its indirect impact on the search giant’s bottom line.
Image Credit: Mike the girl via Flickr (Flickr)
Reviews: Flickr, Google
Tags: Google
True Visual Voicemail: PhoneTag, Google Voice and AT&T’s New Voicemail to Text Service
In case you didn’t realize it, listening to voicemail is a colossal waste of time. Humans read much faster than they can listen, so AT&T’s entry into the Voicemail to Text field is welcome, but it’s a bit late to the party. Other services have been quietly providing this for years; some less expensive and some more expensive.
PhoneTag
Personally, I’ve been a PhoneTag (formerly Simulscribe) subscriber since June 2007 and love the service. PhoneTag replaces your carrier’s voicemail service with its own. PhoneTag will text and/or email you a transcription of your phone messages along with optionally attaching an electronic copy of the voicemail in a variety of formats.
iPhone users who use PhoneTag will lose the ability to use AT&T’s Visual Voicemail, since PhoneTag supersedes the built-in voicemail. Because I can read all my voicemails via email and text, I don’t really mind not having Visual Voicemail.
PhoneTag costs $30 a month (free 1 week trial and other pricing plans available) for unlimited transcriptions and you can forward any number of phones to their service for transcription and the transcriptions go to any number of phones you specify. For example, I have multiple phone numbers for my business and they all forward to that same unified voicemail. When I’m out of town or otherwise inaccessible, the transcriptions go to one of my technicians. Best of all, since the voicemails come in as attachments, I can save every voicemail I’ve ever received right to my computer for daily backup. The transcriptions are nearly flawless, especially if you upload your contacts to the system so you can help it recognize proper names.
Google Voice
On the other end of the spectrum is Google’s free Google Voice service. If you can get an invite, the entire service is free and it also provides transcription of voicemails. Similar to PhoneTag, you’ll need to forward your busy or no answer calls to Google’s phone number.
The transcriptions Google Voice provides border on the ridiculous and I found the service too unreliable for serious business use. Forwarding the messages to multiple phones was difficult and archiving the messages to my computer required manual download of each message. PhoneTag was simply a more elegant and scalable solution when compared to Google Voice. However being free, Google Voice makes a great way to find out if a voicemail to text service is right for you.
AT&T’s New Service
AT&T’s new service costs $9.99 per month — priced squarely in the middle between PhoneTag and Google Voice. Nuance, maker of well-known transcription software Dragon Naturally Speaking, provides the transcription services. Because Nuance is a well-known provider of voice to text services, I suspect it will be much better than Google Voice’s option. While I haven’t tried the service, AT&T claims you can still use your existing voicemail system and similar to PhoneTag and GoogleVoice, makes it easy to archive old messages. Obviously, the service will only work with your AT&T phone.
I’ll stick with PhoneTag due to the quality of its transcriptions and the flexbility of working with multiple phone systems. AT&T’s service is an attractive option for those that don’t need all of PhoneTag’s features.
Now iPhone customers have three options in three different price ranges to avoid listening to voicemail messages and get “true” visual voicemail; voicemails they can read and see without putting their phone up to their ear.
Why are you still actually listening to your voicemails?
