When I logged in to my GMail account today, there was a popup message pointing to a new gmail service - GMail Phone. This is a VOIP telephony service similar to Skype. It uses your PC's microphone and speakers to make calls (although you can't make video calls via the webcam yet). News reports state that over a million calls were made in the first 24 hours that the service was running. There are some suggestions that the service was only supposed to be for US visitors, however, international visitors also had access to it. Whether this was a mistake or not, is not clear. The cost for calling is 'insanely low' (Google's epithet, not mine) for example, to call from the US to the UK costs 2p per minute on gmail phone.