We knew this day would come

Google Voice released a great new feature today, sms-to-email for notification and reply, effectively shutting down GoogSMS.

We knew this day would come, but it came a lot earlier than most expected.

So we’ll be deleting all the data and shutting down the service soon.

I will release an abridged version of the source code for Prowl notification that you can run it off your own server.

Thanks to all the beta testers and early adopters.

Oddness in Google Voice display

I may have found/stumbled upon a display bug in Google Voice.

If a msg thread exists before midnight, and a new message is added to the thread after midnight, the date of the old msgs is incorrectly set to the new day.  Since the msgs themselves don’t have a date display, only a timestamp, this can lead to issues when determining if a message is new or old.

bug in google voice

This message thread was started on 9/5 at 11:17pm.
As I sent a few messages after midnight, the date (second line of the image) changed to 9/6.  The intial messages sent prior to midnight now are associated with 9/6 instead of 9/5.

While this is not a big issue for google voice website users, it could cause a problem for html scrapers of the website.

Not to worry, Googsms has a fix for it.

Using the alternative email for GoogSMS

In your profile on GoogSMS, you can enter an alternative email address.

GoogSMS profile

If this is populated, all communication with GoogSMS will be sent to this email.  Your email notifications will be sent here and you can reply and send SMS from this address.

I use this on my iPhone to handle all my SMS.  I turn on the iPhone push notification so I get push alerts.
This also separates all my SMS from email.
This is also helpful it the email associated with your google voice number isn’t your primary email.

Let me know if you find this useful.

How to set up Google Voice SMS push notification to iPhone via Prowl

Here is a step by step on how to set up Google Voice SMS push notification to your iPhone using Prowl and GoogSMS.com

1. Sign up for Prowl
2. Generate an API Key from the Prowl Settings Page

3.  Download Prowl from the app store ($2.99)
4.  Login to your account on GoogSMS and add your API key to your profile

GoogSMS profile

That’s it.  You will get a Prowl notification of your next SMS.  It should also show up in your inbox.
Don’t forget, you can reply to the SMS via the email.

* Some notes
– Prowl costs $2.99.  However it can we used for many other services yet to be written.
– There is a redirect feature for Prowl to open up the mail app on the iphone when you view the notification.  It takes you to a blank mail instead of your message.  It’s a limitation of Prowl.
Sept 9, 2009 – We have implemented a new link in the prowl notification for easy response.  See blog post