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Comment by trezor | Hacker News Reader

Considering I know noone who uses Google Voice, nobody who uses FaceTime and a million people and two who uses Skype, this article seems kinda silly.

I guess the lesson which people should learn (especially the people in the US), is that there is severe differences between different markets and regions, and whatever happens in the US might be something interesting or it may be the US entering the space the rest of Europe and Asia entered 5 years ago or more.

I still don't get why FaceTime is any better than the other options out there, especially when it only works on Macs and Apple-devices.

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A year ago while still in a closed beta, Google Voice had 1.4 million users, with 570,000 using the service 7 days a week.#1

Skype added 39 million users in Q4 2009, to come to a total of 560 million accounts.#2

Its still early for facetime, but I wouldn't discount Apple, especially with over 120 million iOS devices sold.#3

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#1 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/business-week-14-million-googl...

#2 http://gigaom.com/2010/04/20/skype-q4-2009-number

#3 http://mashable.com/2010/09/01/apple-ios-downloads-stat/

If I called you, you'd have no idea I was using Google Voice. If you called me you'd know because GV will ask you who you are, but that's an option I chose to enable.

I remember, early on, when no one was using Skype except for those that knew about it.

The main difference between Skype and Facetime is one is based on proprietary software and the other is a bundle of open standards. Just because Skype dominates doesn't mean it will always stay that way.

I don't think that's the main difference. I think the main difference is that one works on just about every Desktop and smartphone OS, while the other only works on a single minor desktop OS and a single minor phone OS (albeit fast growing).

And I'm not an Apple hater. I love my Macbook.

How would you know if they used Google Voice? It's not visible to the call's recipient.

Google Voice is pretty much not available outside the US and hence is lagging behind absolutely all the other numerous other VoIP solutions out there, which mostly are available globally.

So yeah. The only way they could be using Google Voice was if they somehow proxies their way to the US, to use a paid Google service to call back to Europe at an extra surcharge to then call me. Call me presumptuous, but I will assume none of my associates are doing that.

In that case, your previous statement was disingenuous. You were implying that Google Voice wasn't taking off because you knew no-one who used it, which is deliberately misleading.

Bad commenter!

What I intended to say was that there are big differences between what services are used where.

If that was unclear I'm sorry about that, but how would I know how Google Voice works when I'm not allowed to use the service?

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