Google Voice opens to the public by July 22?

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.