Thanks to these guys, SMS via Google Talk is now banned from unofficial clients.

innerfence.com

31 points·cookiecaper··5 comments

Well, Google was being silly, too, for keeping that open. But, yeah... nice.

I actually find that post to be rather sickening. Unfortunately, its probably only one of the first of its kind, something I expect to see quite a bit more of in the near future.

With Google's recent layoffs, and some of the more fluff applications being removed, I can only imagine its a matter of time until other things start getting cut to save on costs. When they start closing, all the applications people have built on top of them will have to collapse, and there will be far more complaints like this.

On another note, how on earth did that get through the App Store? Did apple really approve an application that let you send free SMS messages, when so much profit is made by the telephone companies off of them?

What exactly did Google expect to happen when they created the service and published the protocols?

"Google" is not one uniform hive-mind:

It was probably created by one department, and when it start getting big someone else noticed the raising cost and made them shut it down.

Presumably that they'd leak money out the ears providing a public utility but that is OK because they have a de-facto monopoly on the Internet's license to print money.