Here’s a bit of History:

Years Ago…  (around 2005-2006) GrandCentral was started.  It has since been bought by Google and has evolved into Google Voice.  Originally, Invitations were hard to come by.  Sometimes there were open sign-up periods.  At least once in 2007, each existing GrandCentral subscriber received the option to invite 10 more people to GrandCentral.

Back then, many of us phone fanatics might have signed up for more than one account, BUT we always were aware that abusing this loophole might be enough to cause GrandCentral to run out of cash and go under before it became a real, financially viable product.  For similar reasons, we tended to only push accounts on friends and relatives that were going to actually use them.

I kept an early invitation from 2006 and would periodically check to see if there were any new phone numbers available right up until the time that the invitation stopped working in early 2009.  I never saw any new phone numbers – just a slowly draining pool of the numbers that were available when I got my first account.

In 2009, Google relaunched GrandCentral as Google Voice.  In June, 2009 Google acquired a million new phone numbers for Google Voice.  In July and August Google Voice finally opened up and invitations started going out to people who had signed up for one.  At one point, there was only a 24 hour delay between the time that a person requested an invitation and the time that it came through.  (Request your own invitation here:  https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googlevoiceinvite/)

A trailing indicator of all of this is the price that these invitations sell for on eBay.  Early on in 2009, when many of us wanted to be the first to have a Google Voice Account, they were selling for as high as a few hundred dollars apiece.  Usually these accounts were already locked to specific phone numbers and Google Accounts.  Once everything opened up, unused invitations sold for between 30 cents and 3 dollars.  (I’m still not sure how these people managed to get blocks of 100 invitations that they were able to see off so cheaply.  I suppose if everything was completely automated on Google’s side and they weren’t trying to filter out abuse, someone could register a domain name and then write a little script that requested an invitation for A0001@MyNewDomainName.com, A0002@MyNewDomainName.com, A0003@MyNewDomainName.com, etc.  (For the record – I have only requested invitations for friends and have NEVER bought or sold them.))

So how many people were on Google Voice at that point?

Well, in late August, 2009 the flow of invitations slowed down tremendously.  (They were back up to around $6 on eBay, unless you bought a block of them.)  Google and iPrint offered sets of 25 free business cards with your new Google Voice phone number on them to the first 50,000 people who requested them.  That offer lasted for around a week, so I assuming that that means that there were about 100,000 subscribers in late August, 2009.  (Not everyone has a business card fetish and they were only giving each account 25 cards.)

That was probably a good number for Google voice at the time.  Back then, Google Voice was living up to the adjective “Beta” – there were some kinks, many of which were changing every day.  I think that most of us “Early Adopters” are happy to have Google Voice and understand that these kinks are the only real way that a system like this is able to grow and get better.

There did not appear to be any new invitations coming out of Google Voice in September.  Even more disturbing for a control freak like me, many of the “good numbers” were being taken.  (This should have been a separate article…)  Once it became clear that the system (aka GrandCentral/Google Voice) was financially solvent enough to handle infrequent users, I began to push Google Voice on around a dozen friends, family members and co-workers.  Generally speaking, the “ideal” phone number that I found for them back in May was still available in August.  Unfortunately, by September and October , I was seeing many of my favorite phone numbers being snapped up days before I was able to walk my friends through the sign-up process.  I believe that this is a sign that there are a lot more people signing up Google Voice Accounts.  I am frustrated to report that at least three of the accounts that I have set up in the past few weeks for friends missed out on the number that I really wanted for them by less than a week.

(I’m going to save What’s a Good Phone Number for another article.  Around 25% of the time there’s a personal connection (i.e. it spells your name, business or hobby), but usually it’s simply local and has easy to remember digits.)

Back to the title of this article – In the first half of October I was seeing all of the backlog of invitation requests being fulfilled.  Today, October 14^th, 2009, many of us with Google Voice Accounts have noticed that we can now directly invite three friends, so I am expected another big expansion of actual people using Google Voice.  (i.e. If you’ve been eyeing a particular phone number for yourself or a friend, you better get it now.)

One other thought – I am not in any way affiliated with Google, but as an enthusiastic Google Voice user, I want it to succeed and remain free.  As such, I am really glad to see the “invite three friends” option.  I think that that is the best way for Google Voice to spread in these early days.  In some cases I have friends asking me for invitations and in many others I am telling friends that they need Google Voice and they need to trust me and sign up now and understand it later.  In those cases, if I can just show them how one or two of the features will suddenly make a huge difference in their life, it will get them using the system and wanting to learn about what else it can do for them.  (Isn’t that most people’s history with personal computers – they were initially bought to do one really important thing, but over time, they become the tool of choice for many things.)

Google needs this sort of direct-contact marketing for Google Voice.  When GMail came along, it was easy enough for many of us to see that it did everything that our old eMail provider did, plus some other things that we really wanted, all for free.  If we saw that, we switched.  If not, we didn’t.  If we did switch, we didn’t have to learn a lot of new stuff – basically, it was just a matter of the old stuff getting better.  If we have a question about how GMail works, then our two options are to try to find an answer on-line or to ask a geek.

The initial roll-out of Google Voice will require a lot more hand-holding.  Ideally, a person should set up their new account (including all of the forwarding and grouping options) with the help of an experienced friend.  Likewise, when questions come up, it will be a lot more effective to call an experienced friend than just a generic geek.  The more you use Google Voice, the more that you know and the more questions that you have.  (This is like any real area of math or science – maybe eventually it will be a fifth part of the ACT exam?)  There is no customer service number that we can call where we can expect a well-informed person on the other end to spend an hour teaching us how to use Google Voice for free.  This is really going to need to be a word-of-mouth thing.  It is going to take a while for many Google Voice users to “get it”.  (If you’re as old as I am, you will remember all of the questions from friends thirty years ago about “how to get their VCR to record a program ’off of their TV’ ”.)

Another good article that I’d like to see in the future would be many of us sharing our stories of these sorts of “referral accounts” that we have set up.  Who did we set them up for?  What was the initial compelling feature that triggered you setting up this account?  Is your friend using that feature?  Have they expanded on to other features yet?

I am very happy to see Google Voice now directly enabling us to invite friends, relatives and co-workers into the system.

As always, please feel strongly encouraged to comment on any of the articles, as well as eMailing me any new stand-alone articles that you’d like published here.  I really do want this site to eventually have a dozen main contributors that can post articles without going through me.  You could be one of them!

Steven (at) GoogleVoiceSecrets.com