TechCrunch's Michael Arrington got his hands on a copy of the unreleased Google Voice desktop application, and demoes it here. He uses the accompanying piece to urge Google to release the application to the public. And the public apparently has responded with an online petition asking for the same.
If you watch the TechCrunch demo, you'll see why everyone is so excited about the Google Voice desktop app: You can use it to make telephone calls. From your computer. Best of all, you're doing it from a Google application. That's way cooler than using a stupid telephone or Skype, which everybody has.
Look, as journalism, this is great. This is what journalists are supposed to do: Find out stuff they're not supposed to know, and tell the rest of us about it. Showing that stuff to us is even better. Arrington's got a scoop here.
But an online petition begging Google to release a softphone that, as best I can tell from the demo, is pretty much just a telephone on a computer? The petition supposedly had about 2,500 signatures as of yesterday, which is not a big number in whole-world-Internet terms, but is about 2,495 more people than you'd think would care about this.
I think this is celebrity-worship, Internet-style. Arrington says Google is "dogfooding" the softphone, as in "eat your own dogfood" before releasing it to the world. But this app isn't dogfood; it's Kool-Aid, as in "drink the Kool-Aid." Why should anybody care if Google releases a mediocre softphone app? If they do it, fine, give it a try, see if it works better or is cheaper to use because more people deploy it and you get better network effects. If they don't do it, keep using Skype.
The notion that Google is some sort of public trust that ought to respond to a public petition that they release a product (and give it to us for free, presumably) smacks of the business-reality-defying early days of the Internet, pre-tech-crash.
And speaking of drinking the Kool-Aid, here's the most hilarious video ever about the iPhone, language extremely NSFW. Really really NSFW. Don't say I didn't warn you:
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going down to Dairy Queen to demand they release that Caramel Fudge Pecan Blizzard I've heard rumors about. And give it to me for free.
