Disruptive Telephony

Over on “Voice of VOIPSA“, Dustin Trammel wrote a long post called “Click-to-Harrass” that discusses “click-to-call” services and specifically the new Google Maps click to call capability. I wrote a comment that inadvertantly wound up being almost as long as Dustin’s article. Given that it had been a topic I was thinking about writing about here anyway, I decided to cross-post my comment here as well. Dustin,

Nice piece. TechCrunch also had a post yesterday speculating that Google had pulled Click-To-Call because of harrassment issues, although it seems to have just been a temporary service outage as the service is back running today (used it myself this morning).

The interesting thing, though, is that you can see the immense value to the consumer for this type of service. Over the past few days I’ve been testing it myself with calling various local businesses here in Vermont. I have to say it has worked great. Find them in Google Maps, click the “call” button, wait for the ring of my phone, press the “Talk” button on my wireless handset and… ta da… I’m connecting to the business. It is a little…