I’m not really a fan of jumping on the “mock Microsoft” bandwagon, but this is priceless.  I could say something intelligent-sounding about non-Google search engines’ difficult task of changing users’ mentalities about “search = Google”, but I wont.

A few days ago I submitted three email addresses for invitations.  I got two invitations last night, and interesting the one that didn’t get the invite was my gmail account.  Everything works the same anyway. Here’s a screenshot walkthrough of the setup experience.

After I clicked the invitation link in my email and signed in with my gmail account.  I was presented with this screen.

I clicked “Choose a number,” and I was presented with the main interface and an overlay with setup options.

Here I fiddled around until I got a good phone number.

The next step was to put in my existing cell phone number so that when people call my Google Voice number they get me.

The next step has Google Voice call my phone.
 

*ring ring* “Verifying your phone…” stayed on until I answered my phone and input the number.  The call was from my Google Voice number.
 

Success!  My impression of Google Voice has been very positive so far.  I’ll post more about it as I discover.

This picture isn’t great, but it shows the evidence.  …For a better view of the area, why not try the Google Street View of the place?

Making fun of Microsoft is always fun, but let’s not forget that Live Maps has some great features like their “Bird’s Eye View” and in-browser (IE or Firefox) 3D rendering (with Xbox 360  controller support, of course).  To be fair, I remember seeing a Live demo for a Street-View-esque navigator a while ago, even before Google Street View went public.  I guess imagery captured by the Live Local vans will be used for a more polished and integrated version of that.  I’m interested to see how it works out.

Edit at 11:31pm:

PaoloM, on the Channel9 forums, referred me to the “Street-View-like” demo that I thought of.  He sent me a link to this blog post, which was created in early 2006.  The preview is currently still available at http://preview.local.live.com/

As an example I will use a comic from xkcd.  Here’s what it looks like normally:

That’s fine, but the comic itself doesn’t even take up a fourth of the screen.  There are two ways I can make the page bigger.

The first is to go to the zoom button in the bottom right corner of the window.  Clicking on the button rotates between 100%, 125%, and 150%.  Clicking the down-arrow next to the button gives more options. (FYI, that "e" icon next to it is IE7Pro.)

My preferred method is to hold control and then use the scroll-wheel on the mouse to zoom.  Scrolling up (moving the tip of your finger away from you) zooms in, and the opposite zooms out.  (Clicking on the zoom button after using this method brings the webpage back to normal size.)
 

Here’s that same page, zoomed in so the comic fills the window:

Using the ctrl+scroll method, IE supports scaling a page up to 10,000%  Here’s Google.com scaled to that degree:

IE 7′s zooming features was especially helpful before YouTube had a full-screen option, but it’s still helpful for emended flash videos on other websites that don’t have a full-screen option.

Of course, this feature is also handy if you have poor vision, but I like it too, because maxin is easier leaning back in my chair.