Google Voice (formerly GrandCentral)

[Killgannon]

Just got an invite today, did anyone else?

It looks really nice, you can TXT from it, make calls from it, have it forward calls to whatever number you want (multiple ones too). It will do Voicemail to text format. I just got it so I haven't tried all the features yet, but it does work and it's pretty nice.

[Ikith]

I'm on the list. Do they give invites to invite friends like they did with gmail?

[Senoska]

Wow, they've come pretty far with this. Google has some pretty amazing ideas but how do they plan to make any money off this? It's a free service that has to cost a ton of money to run but without question a necessary one. This will make running my business a lot easier if it can ring all of us on our cellphones rather than just me or a co-worker individually.

[Maguspk]

Wow, they've come pretty far with this. Google has some pretty amazing ideas but how do they plan to make any money off this? It's a free service that has to cost a ton of money to run but without question a necessary one. This will make running my business a lot easier if it can ring all of us on our cellphones rather than just me or a co-worker individually.

Are you kidding me? Just by providing a service like this they make money. The more people click their shit the more money they make, that simple. They provide great services such as mail, documents, search engines and now voice, we use them, ads are shown, ???, profit.

Simple business model, really.

[Senoska]

Yea but to read you're email you've got to access their client[webmail, not counting email clients.], to edit documents you have to access their client. To set this up its a one time thing and you can forget it in large part assuming you don't need/want to web based features. Just the calling all my phones at once is enough. One could set it up and never access the software again.

See what I'm sayin'? It seems hard to believe they could possibly rake in a lot of dough with this but I'm not really sure...

I actually have an uncle that works for Google, but he just manages ad campaigns. Granted, the money he deals with is fucking mindblowing, so perhaps its a good strategy... Its just hard to imagine that ad revenue alone will offset the costs that this brings on. You could say the same thing about youtube, which is (and will be) far more used than this is but youtube bleeds money out of Google...

[thebearofscience]

Everything made by Google is fucking amazing. Wouldn't surprise me if they started making computers and became a main windows+mac competitor. They're really ahead of their time with the whole googleDoc cloud storage thing too. Fucking usbs; always lose mine.

[OzzofAsura]

Everything made by Google is fucking amazing.

Pretty much says it all.

[Senoska]

Wasnt there a google Os coming out?

[Jotaru]

Well, they have their phone OS, android. Hopefully a system OS isnt far behind

[Darus Grey]

Google's business model is in getting you to rely on google to provide free services. They don't need to directly make money on a particular service in order to make money over-all on it.

Essentially their business model is based entirely on maintaining a very high level of consumer confidence and satisfaction in their brand in order to maintain their monopoly, unlike your typical monopoly that stagnates once it reaches complete market penetration and begins it's slow death spiral(hey there Microsoft!)

[Lucki]

Well, they have their phone OS, android. Hopefully a system OS isnt far behind

NPR reported that they'll start shipping it out with computers in the second part of '10

[CadgerEX]

Wasnt there a google Os coming out?

Yup Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

[Killgannon]

No invites that I can see. I do think the only way you can access the VM is online though.

[Stee]

Reviving a dead thread...sort of.

Got a invite today and it's pretty cool although the whole free US calls and free text messaging is kind of strange.

For the free US calls you have to call your google phone number then hit 2 before you can dial the number you want to call.

The text messaging from the browser is fine but to do it from your phone I believe you have to wait for the person to text you first then use the weird zip code phone number to reply. I haven't tested it out yet but will try it out later.

[Maguspk]

Got mine the other day and got hey-noah as my number, was pretty happy about that.

[Shiroikage]

This sounds really nice. A shame Canada isn't in on it.

[guartz]

The more people click their shit the more money they make, that simple.

somehow this is true.

[Lucki]

Just got invited last night. Initially requested an invite 3-4 weeks ago

[Stee]

I wish I had more use for the service, besides the basic ring all your phones and visual voicemail I can't find another "ease of use" reason to use it.

[Sonomaa]

I got mine the other day too