VoIP: Google Voice drops call widgets for web pages
There's a company somewhere north of here that offers all sorts of phone and VoIP magic. Google Voice uses them. Ring.to uses them. I want to learn how to use them. Not today but within a year.
Google Voice used to be absolute awesome sauce. As time goes by, though, they keep breaking things and sometimes outright throwing them away. Support for standalone SIP phones and analog telephone adapters was the first major feature to fall. Support for voice over XMPP, which allowed support for some such devices and greatly increased industry support of XMPP, was another.
As of today, here's one: call widgets.
The operation was similar to the "Call" button on the Google Voice page, but set up as a piece of web code to be pasted in a page's template. When used, it would prompt the potential caller for his number, call him at that number, call you at your pre-configured contact points and connect the calls.
Here's one which connects everyone to a voicemail message that says don't leave voicemail here:
code:
The details of the widget are all hidden. The interface seems to be drawn by a Flash app which handles the communication with Google. It looks like a single hex mess looking like 7194ee3537236ee44212d2771b23de760a989841 and passed as a "FlashVars" "value" parameter beginning "id=" is all that ties the web code to my account and the options I've chosen.
And here's Google saying they're done with that feature:
Call Widget feature is being decommissioned. All Call Widgets will stop working on the 1st of June, 2015.
Call Widgets can be put on any web page, and allow people to call from that web page. When somebody clicks on the widget, we call them and connect them to you. Your number is always kept private. You can create multiple call widgets and have different settings for each of them.
Sure enough it doesn't work. The Flash app is served and it goes through the motions, taking the caller's number and changing the Connect button to End Call, but the phone at the given number doesn't start ringing.
A nearly drop-in replacement service can be set up through Twilio but after browsing their very script-heavy site for a few minutes I hadn't found it yet. I remember from attending some of their presentations that this sort of thing is right up their alley.
Twilio (sorry; they make it difficult to link with their hosted logo.)
Google Voice used to be absolute awesome sauce. As time goes by, though, they keep breaking things and sometimes outright throwing them away. Support for standalone SIP phones and analog telephone adapters was the first major feature to fall. Support for voice over XMPP, which allowed support for some such devices and greatly increased industry support of XMPP, was another.
As of today, here's one: call widgets.
The operation was similar to the "Call" button on the Google Voice page, but set up as a piece of web code to be pasted in a page's template. When used, it would prompt the potential caller for his number, call him at that number, call you at your pre-configured contact points and connect the calls.
Here's one which connects everyone to a voicemail message that says don't leave voicemail here:
code:
The details of the widget are all hidden. The interface seems to be drawn by a Flash app which handles the communication with Google. It looks like a single hex mess looking like 7194ee3537236ee44212d2771b23de760a989841 and passed as a "FlashVars" "value" parameter beginning "id=" is all that ties the web code to my account and the options I've chosen.
And here's Google saying they're done with that feature:
Call Widget feature is being decommissioned. All Call Widgets will stop working on the 1st of June, 2015.
Call Widgets can be put on any web page, and allow people to call from that web page. When somebody clicks on the widget, we call them and connect them to you. Your number is always kept private. You can create multiple call widgets and have different settings for each of them.
Sure enough it doesn't work. The Flash app is served and it goes through the motions, taking the caller's number and changing the Connect button to End Call, but the phone at the given number doesn't start ringing.
A nearly drop-in replacement service can be set up through Twilio but after browsing their very script-heavy site for a few minutes I hadn't found it yet. I remember from attending some of their presentations that this sort of thing is right up their alley.
Twilio (sorry; they make it difficult to link with their hosted logo.)