If you use GrandCentral for free phone call service, you’ll be happy to hear Google is releasing Google Voice. It’s only open to GrandCentral users currently, but will be open to a wider audience soon.

A few highlights of Google Voice:

• A single number to ring your home, work, and mobile phones
• Voicemail
• Transcripts of your voicemail
• Archive and search text messages you send and receive

Check out the features to see how it works: https://www.google.com/voice/about

If you’re anything like me, you hit the Google search anywhere between 100 and 1 million times a day. And, if you’re like me, you don’t give a second thought to how much energy you use up. This article in The London Times quotes physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, who says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea.

His estimations are in part from a recent report by industry analysts Gartner Group, who said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about 2% of global CO2 emissions.

Yikes.

In the midst of AIM, Skype, Gmail Chat and heaven knows how many more competing instant messaging tools there are, Google’s making moves to create one less program to keep track of. The company just released a feature that lets you chat with people using AIM from within Gmail. It’s fully integrated with the Gmail Chat feature, so there’s nothing to install. Click the triangle next to Set Status Here link, and choose Sign into AIM. You’ll see your AIM contacts listed along with all your other Gmail contacts.

The problem, of course, is that you don’t want to stay logged in to your Google account. If you do, the company can keep a pretty detailed log of every site you look at and attach it with your account profile. Best to relegate the feature to quick chats while you’re checking your Gmail account.