See my post of 21st Sept. here.

On my way to catch the bus this morning, I spotted a uniquely equipped Chevy Cobalt with California plates parked outside Galtier Plaza. I took a lousy cameraphone shot of it, complete with its carefully tube-socked protuberance. I’m fairly confident this is one of the Google Maps Street View fleet vehicles, and given that it was parked outside an apartment building rather than a hotel, it looks as if they intend to stick around for a little while. Keep your cats away from the windows…

I’ve been a T-Mobile (and before that, Voicestream) customer for about 7 years now. In that time, I’ve been quite satisfied. Their rates are reasonable, their data plans generous, and their coverage totally adequate to my needs. I’ve rarely been tempted to change carriers.

Last November, I started a new job that I love. I’ve got an office with a view in a beautifully restored building. All that’s missing is T-mobile reception. The second I walk in to the building, my signal drops to nothing. Zip. From time to time, my phone will eke out the tiniest signal if I have it placed just so on my desk or window sill, but never such that I can replicate the result (much less place or take a call, unless I want to lay my head down on my desk on top of the phone).

Given that the building houses the University’s Digital Technology Center and Supercomputing Institute, as well as something called the Powerwall (I don’t know what it is, I just know I want one), it should come as no surprise that the place is heavily wired, probably in effect acting like a five-story Faraday cage around my poor phone.

I’d resigned myself to living without workday cell coverage, stepping outside a couple of times a day to check for voicemail, and otherwise relying on my office line, email and I’m to keep in touch. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I got a beta invite for GrandCentral, the free phone number consolidation service recently purchased by Google.

GrandCentral provides each user with a phone number (in the area code of their choice) and voicemail, as well as a robust set of tools for creating rules for call forwarding. In my case, the killer feature is email delivery of voicemail.

T-mobile (can’t speak for other carriers) provides conditional call forwarding, meaning you can set different destination numbers for your calls depending on whether your line is busy, simply not answered, or is unreachable. By default, calls forward to your T-mobile voicemail in each of these scenarios.

Using conditional call forwarding, I was able to specify that when my phone is unreachable, my calls should forward to my GrandCentral number, where they go directly to voicemail, which is then delivered to my email.

This isn’t a perfect system. I still am unable to actually answer calls (although if I really wanted to, I could forward to my Gizmo Project number), and SMS messages sit in the aether until my cell is back on the T-mobile grid. It should also be noted that T-mobile caps the number of free conditionally forwarded minutes per month, so depending on how popular you are, YMMV.

That said, I’m quite happy with the arrangement. I’ve cut the delay before I’m notified of a call to a matter of minutes, from as much as several hours.

Note: GrandCentral has gotten some bad publicity recently for unilaterally changing some users’ numbers (See GrandCentral’s response here). Should such a thing happen to me, all I’d have to do is change my conditional forwarding number, but it does serve as a timely reminder of just how much confidence it’s appropriate to place in services that loudly pronounce their beta status.

It bears mentioning, however, that if you’re planning on reading the book, you should do it soon. I don’t buy hardcover books that often, but I made an exception for this title because I knew its timeliness was fleeting. The pace of the industry is such that some sections of the book are already out of date. A revised and updated version in paperback seems a virtual certainty. In the mean time, check out John’s site: http://battellemedia.com, where he continues to blog search-related items daily.

So, now it’s on to February’s selection. I picked up Just For Fun, which is a semi-auto biography of Linus Torvalds, coauthored with David Diamond. I’m not that far into it, and thus far I’m not enthralled with the odd narrative style, but I’m curious enough about Linus’s background and the origins of Linux that I’m going to stick with it.

For the record, I plan on picking books for this project fairly randomly, but as with Just For Fun, when I don’t have anything else planned, I’m taking titles from Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software Management Training Program reading list, which seems to be a pretty decent curriculum for anyone who finds themselves at the intersection of business and technology.

“Google’s acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services,” he wrote. “This is not a perception that Google can accept.”

I hope that Dave Winer and Om Malik, when they attended Yahoo’s management retreat, didn’t let user advocacy slip from their list of game-changers for 2006. I repeat what I said in an earlier post: If companies like Yahoo want to continue to entice users to live more and more of their lives online, they need to be seen first and foremost as zealous protectors of the data they’re aggregating. Legality isn’t an issue here. It’s simple PR. Fight for me.

Frankly, we expect this kind of behavior from MSN. Opacity and user-unfriendliness are Microsoft’s hallmarks, and there’s a strong precedent on their behalf for cooperating with unreasonable requests from governments.

Yahoo, on the other hand, has invested a great deal of time and money over the past year or so reestablishing street cred, and with relatively non-invasive takeovers of Flickr and Del.icio.us, savvy web users have taken note. What has given these services such cache is their openness, their emphasis on community, sharing and respect for users, and with them, Yahoo has taken a big step forward. Turning over data on search terms to the DOJ without a fight is, in my opinion, two steps backward.

I’ve been a user of Yahoo services for many years. I’ve got Yahoo email accounts, I own a number of domain names through Yahoo Small Business, I’m a member of several Yahoo groups, I use Yahoo IM some, and my Del.icio.us and Flickr accounts have been assimilated. As of today, I’m walking away from those email and IM accounts. I’m (reluctantly) going to be looking for substitutes for Flickr and Del.icio.us. I’m more or less locked in to the other Yahoo services, but will not renew them.

It should be noted, as Danny Sullivan has on Search Engine Watch, that turning over this data does not probably constitute a violation of privacy by the search engines. The identity or patterns of individual searchers were not disclosed. What was disclosed was the willingness of MSN, AOL and Yahoo to cave to federal pressure without a fight. I want to patronize companies that will fight for me.

I am in no position to opine on the legal issues surrounding this case, but several things are clear to me. The Department of Justice wanted this data in order to make a case for the renewal of the Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA) by showing the relative ease with which minors can access pornography via the web. Of course the most effective means for determining the extent of minors’ viewing of pr0n would be to collect data on unsupervised web use, or to mine the browser caches and cookies of PCs to which kids have access. Because this data is unobtainable, DOJ is substituting a count of searches for suspicious terms devoid of any context or user age information.

If I got burned by hot fast food coffee, I wouldn’t sue the minimum-wage worker who cranked up the pot’s thermostat too high, or filled the cup too full, or failed to secure the lid. I’d sue the parent company, because they’ve got the billions.

When the government wants information about internet use, whether it makes sense or not, they’re going to go to the search engines, because they’ve got the data.

At this point, I’d like to bring it back to Google. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been reading John Battelle’s The Search. Battelle does a great job of highlighting the tension at Google between the “Don’t be evil” ethos and the incredible power of their near-monopoly on search. He puts this in the context of the USA PATRIOT Act, and now it’s resurfaced in the COPA. This won’t be the last time.

I give Google a great deal of credit for their refusal to comply with this worthless request. I also applaud their recent strong stance against bandwidth carriers’ desire to charge content providers for access, which would mean BellSouth and others would be getting paid on both ends of many data exchanges.

However, let’s not overlook the fact that Google has some skeletons in its own closet. There’s the matter of censorship on its Chinese news portal. They also deserve a little heat for AOL’s actions in the COPA case, seeing as how they now own part of the company. Firms which base their business model on users’ willingness to turn over large portions of their online lives must be active stewards of that data. Anything less will be bad for business.