Google mail offering SMS Text Messaging

Official Gmail Blog: SMS Text Messaging for chat

The Egodeity has laboured long and hard to get his casual computer using accomplices to defer to his enlightened technological advances. 'Switch to Apple', 'use Firefox', 'everybody uses Facebook now', and for a long time 'get a Gmail account'. Sometimes financial issues would halt his conversions, other times it would be fear of the unknown. Most often it was just laziness, with most people just content with struggling with what they've got.

Now though, Gmail is offering a truly spectular update - one that is surely newsworthy (in the youth-orientated radio stations' "...and finally" sort of way) - free SMS from within webmail. At GBP0.10 per text message the best offer in Britain, and more and more people getting web-based phones, this update gives the consumer a nice little pin to prick at the cell phone companies with, given their unchallenged oligopical extortion over the last decade or so.

Unfortunately, Google retains it's almost self-defeating Amero-centricity, and is only rolling the service out in the United States. They have a few little in-jokes, such as all texts eminate from the l33tish 406 area code (Goo if you look at it right), but once a number is assigned to a particular address, it is assigned permanently and indivually to that address, so it can be saved as a phone number on a friend's phone. Particularly nifty. However, it does raise the spectre that they will run out of numbers to assign very quickly.

Anyway, the egodeity looks forward to this rolling out to these shores, and will plug it like a fiend until he converts SOMEone to the magesty that is Google's web-based mail service.