Thank you Google for getting me my milkshake

Have you seen those television commercials for Sonic Drive-In's Oreo milkshake? I like to think that I am above the influence of advertising, but somehow that little ad got stuck in my head and for the past month or two I have needed an Oreo milkshake like I have not needed anything ever before. My life was empty and unfulfilled as I stayed strong and told myself that I did not in any way need a giant milkshake full of cookies. But as with nearly all of my moral battles, I gave in to the cries of desperation from my stomach and on Saturday night around 10:00 I found myself on the way to drown my weak will in frozen dairy deliciousness. In my enthusiastic dash to the drive-in, it never occurred to me that I did not actually know where to find a Sonic. Luckily I remembered reading just that very afternoon about Google's new 411 service, 1-800-GOOG-411.

Having launched earlier this month I wasn't expecting this Google Labs product to be nearly as polished as it was. Not only did the automated operator software recognize my voice commands (not helped at all by the desperation in my voice), but it gave me exactly the results I was looking for and offered to send the results as a text message to my phone or patch me through to the business if I wanted. And best of all, this was entirely free. Here is a GOOG-411 cheat sheet, but unlike Google's SMS offering it was so intuitive that you don't even really need to look at it. I can only assume that they will be integrating this with Google Maps and sticking some ads into each call, but even at this early stage they have the best 411 service around and earned a spot in my speed dial.

Oh, and my milkshake was just as delicious as I had hoped.

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Posted by Mark Allen on Tuesday, April 17, 2007