Sometimes Google does strange and annoying things, like when I got a ton of wrong, and even dangerous, information from Google Maps at the same time that the tech press was excoriating Apple for “botching” its own Maps app, or when they ruined Google Voice by making it suck on the iPhone and not developing it for years, leading me to stop using it entirely.

Here’s another confusing and stupid thing that Google is doing that I just discovered today. When I got a vanity URL for my Google plus profile, and then typed a version of that URL into my browser, it sent the URL through a redirect chain with a 301 redirect followed by two 302 redirects, only then landing on their version of the page.

Take a look for yourself:

I typed in: http://google.com/+natangesher. Then it got a 301 redirect to the secure https version. Then it got a 302 redirect to plus.google.com. Then it got another 302 redirect to capitalize my first name and my last name.

This is really shoddy work. They should hire a good SEO to find these problems for them and fix them before launch.

For the past few years since I moved to the United States, I’ve used a Google Voice telephone number exclusively, and before that I used it as an American number for sending and receiving text messages while I lived in Israel. I’ve evangelized for, propagandized about and agitated on behalf of Google Voice, winning for the free service many new users. And now I’ve quit using it. Here’s why.

First, Google Voice is a pretty complex product with a ton of features. Different GV users depend on completely different features than other GV users. The ones that most mattered to me were:

• Choosing my number. Google Voice lets its users pick their own telephone numbers (US only, and only from what they’ve got in their database at that time). For me, that meant I could have a number spelling my name, in an area code (Manhattan) that had personal meaning to me.
• Texting from the web. People who have never carried out entire text message conversations using the comfort of a full sized keyboard have no idea what they’re missing. Typing exclusively with thumbs is for suckers!
• Ringing all my phones. I actually don’t have a landline at home, so I used this primarily in the office. Besides my mobile phone, I set my desk phone to ring when my Google Voice number was dialed during business hours, and it appeared seamless and perfect to anyone who called me.
• Voicemail transcriptions. Google Voice transcribed all my voicemails and sent them to me as emails. I also often listened to them using the GV web app or iOS app. Because of this, I’ve never had to call into my voicemail box from my mobile phone since I’ve been using GV exclusively.
• Call widgets. When I wanted people beyond my friends and family to be able to call me, but didn’t want to post my telephone number online for the whole world to see, I set up Google Voice call widgets. One recent example was when I was selling some furniture in San Francisco before moving to New York: I set up a web page for the furniture sale, added a contact form at the bottom and attached a javascript GV call widget. Someone clicking on the call widget would enter his or her own telephone number to receive a call from GV, which would then call my telephone to connect with me.
• International calling. Plenty of services provide this, but Google Voice is relatively inexpensive and lets me call from my own (GV) telephone number.

So there’s clearly a lot of good and cool and interesting features packed into Google Voice. And though I used a lot of them, I never even touched some others like setting up my contacts into groups and assigning different call greetings for different groups.

Why, then, would I get rid of such an amazing service?

• Poor iPhone integration. Google Voice can easily forward all calls and text messages to a user’s phone, but making outgoing calls and sending text messages from a GV phone is an entirely different story. Because Apple wants to control the calling and messaging experience for iPhone users, this functionality is built tightly into iOS, and Google Voice can’t access outgoing calling or text messaging. Consequently, iPhone users with Google Voice will appear to have two telephone numbers: even though they may tell people to call them at GV number XXX-XXX-XXXX, any calls or texts will come from the carrier’s number YYY-YYY-YYYY.There are ways around this. One is to use the Google Voice iOS app, which is not good. Another is to jailbreak one’s iPhone and install the Call on GV phone extension and the GV SMS Extension, which basically works, but not without a ton of hassle and time and energy and patience (not to mention that these jailbreak tweaks are updated months later than the jailbreaks, which themselves come months behind major new iOS versions).

• Crappy iOS app. Separately from not being able easily to make calls or send text messages from an iPhone using one’s Google Voice number, the Google Voice iOS app is utter rubbish and brings shame to Google every time I look at it. The design is decrepit; basic functionality is missing (like live updating in SMS conversations); there’s not even an iPad version.
• Missing MMS support. MMS is the protocol used for sending pictures in text messages, as well as sending group text messages. When someone sends a text message with a picture attached to a Google Voice user, it never arrives, and that is outrageous and wrong. But even worse than that, no notification whatsoever is sent to the sender or the intended recipient. The message and picture just vanish into thin air. In case you don’t follow what this means, I’ll give an example. Last month, my cousins came to visit me in San Francisco. In advance of their visit, I mailed a set of apartment keys to one of them. He took a picture of the keys and sent it to me with a text message saying that he’d received them. A week later, I asked him if he had ever received the keys I’d sent. I had no idea that he’d sent me the picture, and he had no idea that I hadn’t received it. This flaw alone is enough that anyone with Google Voice should strongly consider abandoning it.To complicate matters further, there is basic support for MMS in Google Voice when the sender’s mobile carrier is Sprint. On a few occasions when people have sent me pictures, I’ve correctly identified that they have Sprint based on this knowledge.

• Google Contacts vs. iCloud contacts. Both systems for contact management, Google Contacts and iCloud contacts / Address Book, are ok but flawed. What I find very annoying is that it’s quite difficult to keep them both in sync without contacts getting duplicated. There is some software that copies iCloud contacts to Google Contacts and vice versa – but it’s clunky – and it’s of course possible to import the contacts from each service into the other manually every once in a while, but I’m not aware of any way to keep them constantly and smoothly in sync with each other. Also, because they’re not set up to play nicely with each other, importing means that they treat data differently. Google Contacts, for example, has a nasty habit of treating a two-word business name as a person’s name (for example, Dhaba Restaurant would be entered as firstname: Dhaba and lastname: Restaurant); iCloud, on the other hand, has difficulty accepting that one of my contacts may have more than one mobile phone number. Bottom line, managing and maintaining one set of contacts is plenty.
• Dropped calls and never-calls. It’s difficult to pin this problem to Google Voice specifically, rather than to my individual phone’s carrier or the phone itself, but since I used an iPhone, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4S, on Partner-Orange, AT&T and Verizon, in Tel Aviv, suburban Maryland and San Francisco, it’s fair to say that the constant throughout all of this was Google Voice. And Google Voice constantly dropped my calls.

  Even worse than a dropped call is a never-call, which is my name for when someone calls me, and it rings and rings and then goes to voicemail, except the ringing part never happened and it actually just went straight to voicemail. This has happened to me hundreds of times with Google Voice and it’s stupid and annoying and makes no sense. I have literally been sitting and holding my telephone and staring at it, waiting for someone’s call, when a missed call notification suddenly pops up, followed by a new voicemail notification – without ever getting a ring. This sucks.

• Shortcodes. Shortcodes are the four- or five-digit numbers that many online services, like Facebook and Twitter, use for verification of a user’s telephone number (and identity), as well as for notifications. They are becoming more popular over the years. Google Voice does not support them at all.

If those were the goods and the bads of Google Voice, what is the ugly? The terrifying reality is that ever since Google acquired GrandCentral and turned it into Google Voice, they have been at best apathetic and ambivalent about their astonishingly powerful and interesting service. And it seems clear to me that Google has barely put any resources at all into developing Google Voice in the past three years, which is as long as I have been using it.

Google of 2013 is a different company than Google of 2010 was. Eric Schmidt is gone, and under the stewardship of Larry Page, Google has renewed its focus on areas of its business that make money, or that solidify its lead to make money in the future, or that prevent its competitors from ever becoming dominant enough to prevent it from making money. Google Voice is not in one of these areas, and that is why it has been ignored.

It’s not alone. Many other Google services have been left to die, or have been killed, in the past few years. Google Reader was probably the best of them, and the frustration and anger that poured forth at Google from Reader’s very dedicated users was, at least in part, a function of people’s frustration and anger with Google. That frustration and anger wasn’t purely over Reader’s demise. It was also largely because Google first established itself as the dominant RSS services provider, obliterating all competition by giving Reader away for free, then ceased all innovation and product development for years except to take away users’ sharing options in favor of a favored Google service, Google plus, and finally killed Google Reader when no other service could possibly replace it.

If anyone doubts that Google Voice will one day go the route of Google Reader, I have a bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan to sell him. Google Voice is, in the long run, of zero value to Google’s business and, though I wish they’d sell it to another company or charge money for it, Google will kill it – if not this month than next month, if not this year than next year. But they’ll wait to kill it until they feel like it, and they will keep it alive – but hobbled by missing features – for as long as necessary to ensure that no competing company can develop and launch a similar service. In this way, I might add, Google is evil.

For me, the future is to continue using my Google Voice telephone number as a Verizon number, which is possible because of number portability. More than ninety percent of the people I know have iPhones, so iMessage from my iPhone, iPad and Macs will replace sending text messages from the web. Since a few of my friends don’t have iPhones, I’ll just not get to their text messages as quickly as I’d like.

iMessage is not a mature service, but at least it’s in Apple’s incentive to continue developing it. I wish they would open it up to third parties, but know they won’t, which is a topic for another blog post on another day.

And by the way, when I ported my Google Voice number to my iPhone, I actually set up another one, just in case I ever wanted or needed it. Naturally, it also has my name in it.

When I moved to San Francisco in August 2011, it was a bit unexpected – even by me. I’d left Israel earlier that year without much of a direction or an idea about what to do next, and a few months later I’d begun looking for jobs. After very nearly accepting an offer for a position in New York, I got a phenomenal opportunity with CNET’s audience development team (CNET is owned by CBS, and part of CBS Interactive) to be its SEO Product Manager, and I borrowed a ton of money to move there very quickly.

I’d never really been west of the Mississippi River before. I had no idea what San Francisco or California would be like. It was kind of an adventure. Now, after two years working at CBSi/CNET and living in San Francisco, I’ve left both to return to New York.

San Francisco doesn’t need me to list all the great things about it, but I’ll point out a few of them anyway.

The thing I love the most about San Francisco is the climate. People seem to complain about the weather in San Francisco all the time, but it’s about as close to the ideal as I can imagine, with the only exception being that it never snows. I love the cool summers. I love the foggy, gloomy despair. I love the microclimates and knowing that there could be four or five real changes in weather in the next ten blocks. One of my goals in life is to be able to spend every June, July and August in this 49 mile paradise.

I also enjoy San Francisco’s business, food and park cultures. The high concentration of technology companies in San Francisco alone means that I’ll certainly be back many times, and may live there again.

In two years of San Francisco, the number of hooded sweatshirts in my wardrobe grew by three hundred percent, from one to four. And four hooded sweatshirts may actually not be enough for living in San Francisco full time.

San Francisco also taught me about about many new things and peculiar west coast euphemisms:

• foody: a person who likes food, whether cooking it or eating for it, and wants other people to know how much he likes it
• EDM: techno music
• Black Rock City: Burning Man
• succulent: a small plant
• Walnut Creek: very distant suburb where a surprising number of the Bay area’s attractive girls reside
• hella: west coast version of wicked
• geeking out on something: enjoying something

The bad part of San Francisco is that it has a serious problem with crime, poverty and vagrancy that people don’t like to acknowledge. These social ills are way out of control, in a way that would take a Giuliani to correct (that would be in our modern context, though I’d prefer something a bit more severe; neither, of course, is on anyone’s agenda). So the pleasant neighborhoods continue to be interspersed inconveniently with the ugly and gritty neighborhoods, the housing projects and the feces-laden slums, as if by design.

Where people do acknowledge this issue, they don’t particularly seem to consider it a problem.

Suggesting that places like Oakland and the Tenderloin could stand to be cleaned up and made more pleasant and civil for taxpayers to enjoy is a gruesome faux pas in San Francisco. When I mentioned things like this in the past on the facebook, I lost friends for it every single time (I use the Social Fixer extension, so I’m able to keep track of who unfriends me). I was also rejected by a girl I wanted to date because I failed to acknowledge that the Mission is San Francisco’s superior neighborhood. San Franciscans are the most intolerant group of people I’ve ever met.

Also, the hills are pretty but it’s really annoying to walk up and down them all the time. I thought I’d get used to the hiking, but I didn’t. I took scooter lessons last year and got a motorcycle permit, so if I’d stayed, I would have bought a Vespa to be able to get around more easily.

San Francisco, you are wonderful and I hope you’ll take my constructive criticism, but I don’t think you will. But I’ll see you some time in the future.

This has happened to me a bunch of times already, and I keep having to figure out what the problem is and how to fix, so I thought I’d write this to make it easier to find in the future.

What does it mean when your iPhone can no longer be backed up to your computer because of “Other”? What is “Other” and why does “Other” sometimes seem to take up five, ten, twenty or more gigabytes of space on your iPhone when you’re looking at it in iTunes?

In my experience, this happens because of a database corruption, which can sometimes be caused by disconnecting the iPhone’s cable from the computer while it is backing up or syncing. The corrupted database causes a file not to be recognized, which causes it to get duplicated, and it continues getting duplicated every time the iPhone is synced after that.

Most files are tiny, and so this shouldn’t be a major problem most of the time. But in my case, the files that got duplicated dozens and hundreds of times were voice memos, ranging in size from five megabytes to sixty megabytes apiece. These files are apparently considered “Other” instead of “Audio,” and that’s how “Other” grew in my case to take over my entire iPhone.

Here’s how to solve the problem:

1. Download iExplorer; open it and connect your iPhone.
2. In iExplorer, navigate to {your iPhone} > Media > Recordings.
3. Identify the duplicated files. This can be a bit tricky, since the files are named numerically, and they’re also identified as duplicates numerically. The key is to see that duplicates get a 1, 2, 3, &c. added at the end of the original’s file name (pre-extension). For example, if there’s a file called “20090828 115904.m4a,” then “20090828 115904 1.m4a” would be its first duplicate, “20090828 115904 2.m4a” would be its second duplicate, “20090828 115904 3.m4a” would be its third duplicate, and so forth.
4. Highlight all the duplicated files, being careful not to highlight any originals.
5. Right-click and select Delete.

As long as you’re only deleting files with the m4a file extension, you can be sure that you won’t be destroying your iPhone and causing irreparable damage, so the worst case scenario is that you might delete some of your voice recordings that you actually intended to keep.

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