The Industry Standard - Google Voice opens to the public by July 22? - Comments

Judged negative. As of this

Ian Lamont — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:02:24 -0400

Judged negative. As of this morning, the message at the top of the "About" page (http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html) says "Google Voice is currently available by invite only."

Incidentally, I applied for an invite when it opened up to requests three or four weeks ago. No dice yet, even though I use a lot of Google services (alerts, docs, Blogger, etc.).

Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
twitter.com/the_standard

They've gone from invite to

Andrew Badera — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:05:04 -0400

They've gone from invite to public with GAE and GAE-Java pretty quickly ... GC/Voice has been languishing for years ... having seriously mixed feelings here.

This prediction rose 12%

Ian Lamont — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:52:43 -0400

This prediction rose 12% today, probably in reaction to the following announcement:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-voice-invites-on-their-way...

Note, however, the language in prediction about invite-only schemes for new users. This will not suffice for favorable judgement.

Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
twitter.com/the_standard

Google Voice opens to the public by July 22?

Ian Lamont — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:05:25 -0400

In mid-June, there was a flurry of speculation about the imminent public launch of Google Voice, a free service that provides call forwarding to a single number, transcribed voicemail messages, conference calls, cheap international phone service, and free national phone calls. While Google Voice has been open to a limited group of beta testers for months, the rumor of an imminent public launch turned out to be premature.

However, a Google Voice product manager named Craig walker did weigh in on the rumor via Twitter. He said the team was "cranking 24/7" to get the product out the door, but indicated it would not happen in a matter of days.

Certainly, there are many potential problems for developers to address, ranging from security concerns to architecting the service to scale to millions of users. But the fact that Google has been working on the product for years, and opened it up to beta testers months ago indicates that a wider launch can't be too far off.

Prediction: Google, which had a limited rollout of Google Voice in March, is getting close to launching the service to the wider public. This predictions states that it will be opened to the U.S. public on or before July 22, 2009. An invite-only system (similar to what was used for Gmail when it was launched) will not suffice for a favorable judgment -- it has to be easy for any U.S. resident to sign up for Google Voice and start using the service.