Social chatter around IP-telephony has gravitated toward Google today. According to this post, the company has purchased SayNow, a voice/telephony service provider whose offerings were lots like the old pay-per-call (976) numbers offered by Ma Bell in the 1970s through 1990s: ‘scopes, soaps and jokes. We used to call it “Telemedia” and it was a magnet for billions of automated calls and the basis of a multi-billion business.

The acquisition signals a branching out for the search giant. Its telephony platform is already an amalgam of previously purchased IP-telephony specialists GrandCentral and Gizmo5 mashed-up with home-grown features and functions that include speech-recognition, dictation, message transcription, machine translation along with novel ways to originate phone calls (from IM clients or Gmail).

SayNow brings to Ma Google a number of important links. It is a traffic magnet for phone calls, a communications link to the popular “social platforms” (already providing visitors to Facebook fan pages or Twitter “tweets” with a way to originate telephone calls and it is a link for recognized entertainment personalities and “brands” to communicate with customers and fans. It is consistent with Google’s advertiser supported model and, best of all, it is acknowledgment of something I’ve been saying for a long time: The phone is the very first conversational medium and, as such is the foundation of social and conversational commerce.

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Tags: IP telephony, Google, Voice Mashups