More than 15 people have contacted me looking to receive an invitation to Google Voice, unfortunately Google has decided not to include an invite quota for their invitees as they did GMail back in the day.  Hope this clears up that question :: here are a few reasons why I believe Google has appeared to cease sending invitations to the public at large :

1. PSTN termination is expensive – and as much cash as Google has, I can’t imagine it being extremely lucrative at this point with free North American dialing.
2. Google purchased a block of 1,000,000 DID’s (phone numbers) which very well could be their “beta pool”.  I could be wrong but they may keep their testers to a “small” group until they figure out if they should continue (turn a profit from the service).
3. There have been issues with SIP trunking, apparently they dropped it quickly when some clever folks discovered Google was using shockingly weak passwords.  This may be something they want to clear up before inviting more people.

As soon as I heard peoples patience was wearing thin, I decided I would sign up for another account with my other GMail address (seeing as I received my first invite within two days).  It has now been a month with no response – so don’t fret, you are not the only one.  As far as I can tell there doesn’t appear to be any pattern to their invite protocol, I think in the beginning it was really all about timing.

As frustrated as you may be eventually you will get your invite – lets hope you don’t have to wait another two months… Good luck to you all and in the meantime read my first impressions.

Well I just received an invite to Google Voice and I must say I was quite upset to discover that it is not yet available in Canada… nonetheless I had a socks box in Cali so I tunnelled my registration and was ready to rock.

For those of you unfamilliar with Socks – it basically pushes all requests through a secure connection on a remote system and is quite simple to do – take a look at my “How to Watch American TV in Canada” post from a while back.

Once I was in I ran into another little snag, you can not set your call-in number to an international DID (in my case a Canadian DID).  So I just pointed them to my free IPKall number and was really cooking with gas (you too can get a free IPKall DID at ipkall.com).

For those of you anticipating an invite yuo can expect the usual Google UI (thank god (I adore simplicity)), you can also look forward to transcribing your voicemail messages to text – and have them emailed.  This functionality has been lacking in Asterisk which is why I believe this is going to drop a nuke on the Asterisk devs to get this module out – so support your * developers will ya!

I’ve really only done minimal “tire-kicking” but I expect this could have many telcos shaking in their boots.  Not only is it super feature rich, sociable and ridiculously easy to use – it is backed by a company who has provided extremely reliable services since day one.

It is interesting to see the callout function implementation.  There have been plenty of callout scripts for Asterisk (which pretty much work exactly the same – Asteristickies is one of ‘em) but once again Google has made it that much friendlier.  Callout is a dialing function when you input a number to call, it connects to you first – then dials the remote party.

SMS is a joy! I was lucky enough to have my sister visiting this week with her unlimited text messaging plan.  I popped open the SMS box and we were sending messages with ease instantaneously.  I especially love the contact manager.  Being able to maintain a list of contacts with click to call functionality is a very powerful feature.

Anyway, I am very excited to play with my new toy – feel free to give me a ring at

(361)-GEEK-HUT

Heh… or use this thing