Google announced yesterday that Google Voice is open to the public. You don’t need an invitation; you just sign up and you get “one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more.” That’s great. Some of these features might really be helpful to a lot of people. I’ve been trying it out for the last week or so and I like the transcripts of voicemails I get via email and text. The iPhone’s Visual Voicemail is pretty awesome — no calling a number to check your messages or having to listen to a bunch of messages to get to the one you want, etc. So if you have an iPhone, the improvements of Google Voice are diminished. If you don’t have an iPhone, you’ll probably find Google Voice’s transformation of voicemail to be a little revolutionary.
Anyway, my big question here is: How can this be free? Mike Elgan offers one answer:
I’m going to give it to you straight: I believe Google Voice is free because Google wants to track your phone calls, read your voicemails and text messages and invade your privacy to offer you up on a silver platter to advertisers.
Hmph. Maybe Google Voice isn’t so cool after all…