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I think there's probably more to the whole Google Voice thing than is, uhh, on the surface. ;-)

I suspect even if Google knew that the application would be rejected that they still would have developed it to start a PR coup to knock the iPhone off of its pedestal. I don't think Google really cares all that much about Google Voice in isolation -- it's of limited strategic value by itself. But if you see it as part of their overall mobile strategy of commoditizing the smart phone market (which Google Voice also helps), and if you look at how important it is for Apple that that not happen, I think the conflict of interest has more teeth.

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i would say it is of maximal strategic value. knowing who calls who is the ultimate social graph. note the analytics news out of ibm re snazzy.

and what better way to target ads to them than to know exactly what they are talking about?

> knowing who calls who is the ultimate social graph.

Reading HN today has paid off I see. That's a brilliant insight.

"who I call" is a massive subset of my social graph.

Most of the things I do are arranged by email/IM. We agree to go to someone's house at a particular time, and then we do so. I'd only call if I managed to get lost.

You mean arranged via gmail/gtalk?

Yes.

(The penetration numbers I've heard for gmail mean that college students do not use technology like anyone else. Then again, they're a pretty sweet marketing demographic...)

Yes, but even that subset has tremendous value, if only because you will probably assign different values to different methods of communication.

Communications methods that have a cost associated with them are used for more important stuff than those that are free.

When the telegraph was introduced it certainly wasn't wasted on trivialities, every word cost money.

The phone still costs money, even if the amount per word is so low that in practice it is also used for many trivial communications.

The cost of email and IM is so low that most of it is trivial, spam exists for that one reason only. If an email would cost you 25 cts then spam would be non-existent.

So the graph of who calls who probably has significant value, possibly more than who mails who or who IMs who.

you and i are here on hn. we are the definition of subset. your subset is infinitesimally small in the macro environment of voice conversations. there are billions of people who do not have computers - but do have nokia cell phones. that is the growth market of the next decade.

imho, the us market will lead the way as a test bed for services of this nature to be rolled out globally.

I'm going to say that of my "cohort" in college, email+facebook events were by far the most effective ways to get people to go to a place at a given time.

Further, I would wager my parents' generation do much of this planning via word of mouth at church. This is highly anecdotal though.

(In any case, I think you overstate the set of people without computers but with cell phones from which reasonable social graphs can be generated. Some places cells are rare enough they are shared by a group of people...)

tough day at the office? pump the breaks on the sarcasm mate, you're burnin unique id's.

Actually I'm self employed and have been for about 2 decades now.

Also I was serious.

I never thought of the value that is inherent in knowing who calls who. That's the sort of gem that comes by here every now and then.

as to unique id's...

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