Rumors have spread across many reputable sources, including Wired, that users of Google‘s not-so-popular calling/SMS service, Google Voice, may be disappointed in the near future.
All indications seem to point to Google wanting to solidify its messaging ecosystem much in the same way they solidified their social sharing with Google Plus.
Google Babel, as the new service has been nicknamed by the online community, would bring together services like Voice, Hangouts, GTalk and potentially even Gmail and provide a single ecosystem for instant and cooperative communication.
Google hasn’t updated its Google Voice blog since December and Android Police are now saying that after taking apart the new version of the Google Voice App just recently released on Android. By allowing users to export all their information from the app, Google is following their past trend of allowing customer data to be manually exported or downloaded before an app is sent to the graveyard.
Google is staying silent for now on Babel and what it would mean to both Google users and the Android ecosystem as a whole. Apple did something similar with its chat ecosystem about a year ago, but has yet to integrate its chat service, iMessage, with video service FaceTime.
this should not mean the end of Google Voice. Google Voice has it contracts integrating with Sprint. Also it is more about making real phone calls rather than messaging.
I sincerely hope it doesn't but all of the signs are there that Google has made before when it was planning to pull the plug on a project, it's my personal opinion and they haven't announced anything directly but I feel it's still important to report for those of us that use the service and so we are not blind sided like we were when they announced the closing of Reader.