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People either love or hate text messaging. Text message is a quick way to shoot a quick message to someone without interrupting the sender or recipient. Quick messages may attribute as far back as hyper terminal where you would exchange messages between one another over the phone line. The term ‘instant message’ was coined by AOL when their AOL Instant Messenger became a hit in the romance movie, “You’ve Got Mail” starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. IM eventually became so popular as more and more people spend hours behind their computers that we had to move IM to your mobile gadgets.
In comes text messaging. Most of my friends text and prefer text over phone calls. Phone calls require your full attention but text you can slip in and out of a conversation in a split second. Previously, the natural progression from e-mail is on to phone call. But with the rise in popularity, it is not surprising that people may want to IM or chat and even text before talking on the phone.
Now the dilemma arrives. You want to text with someone but do not want to share your mobile phone number, at least not yet. There is a nifty alternative and that is called Google Voice. Seems like I have been a marketing play for the big ‘G’ lol. I assure you I do not work for Google. I simply love their products! Google Voice is a web based phone number which includes an online voicemail and text messaging function. I use it for my phone and I love it! I especially love the voice to text feature on your voicemail. When someone leaves a voicemail, it transcribes it and sends you an email and / or text message of the transcribed message. How does this help you? You can send and receive text messages via your Google Voice portal on the web. This will allow you to text without giving you your real phone number. If you have a smart phone, you can download the Google Voice app and send and receive text message from your phone. Nifty!