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"Free Text Messaging" is an interesting 4 year period, though it looks like it's dead as a search term now. Is this because of Google Voice? Or did people give up on the idea?

http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:g2VSqRc0n...

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Everybody has unlimited texting on their phones now so there's no need. There was a time when unlimited texting was rare and not all phones even had SMS, so it was popular to use various free web-to-SMS gateways if you were at a computer and your recipient may not be. I used AT&T's gateway in particular to message friends for a few years before I got an SMS phone. There were also shady ad-strewn "free texting" gateways, some acting as frontends to the official ones, some with a Turk behind the scenes, and even some that didn't work at all but just faked a texting interface to serve up ads.

I'd say a combination of Facebook chat, Google voice, and the announcement of Apple's new exclusive free-texting club. http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.html#imessage

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