For months I've been under the impression that Google Voice may become one of the most important products of our time -- like simple search engines and Web-based e-mail services with large archives so you never have to delete your messages. (Am I sensing a trend here with Google?)

If you're not one of the 1.5 million registered users of Google Voice, you might not yet understand its possibilities. It's an Internet-based phone service that allows you to use a single phone number and attach it to multiple land lines and cell phones -- a sort of personal phone number that's free and will follow you for life (if you can deal with the idiosyncrasies).

I'll give you the good and bad about Google Voice in future columns (and there are a lot of both), but right now let's consider how important this product may be in your future.

All alone, Google Voice may represent a change to the way you make phone calls. It already has changed the way I make mine. I stopped giving out cell phone numbers long ago, instead giving out my Google Voice number, which gets forwarded wherever I am. If I can't take the call, it holds my voice mail for me. It even transcribes my messages (although often not very well), and sends them to me by e-mail or text message. But Google Voice, a service that Google obtained when it purchased a company named Grand Central, doesn't have to stand alone.

Google recently showed how aggressively it wants to be in the telephone business. It recently spent $30 million to purchase Gizmo5, a company that does Internet phone calls, much like Skype does. It also spent $750 million to purchase AdMob, a company that does mobile advertising. It would be hard for Google to hide the fact that it must be looking to get into the phone business in a big way -- and to do it using advertising for its revenue instead of charging users big bucks.

Perhaps that's really why AT&T has cried foul about Google blocking certain telephone numbers from getting access to Google Voice. The telecom giant isn't worried about competition in rural America. It's worried that Google will use an unfair advantage to turn the telecommunications market upside down, in the same way that the Internet has skewered the travel industry.

Google is doing what it can to not look like a telephone company as it becomes one, because as a phone company, it would be highly regulated. But as a phone company in search-giant clothing, it might not be subject to the same harsh rules as the current telecom kings. That fear isn't keeping the kings of telecom from doing business with Google, though. Its Android operating system is expected to take over the smart phone market, with most cell phone manufacturers working on Android-based phones, and most cell phone services scurrying to offer those phones -- even though in the long run, they are creating what is likely to be one of the biggest threats to ever hit them.

Google has turned "Free" into an art. Android is free to the cell phone companies and very visible. Even if you have no idea what it is or what it means, chances are that in recent weeks, you've seen a futuristic commercial for the Droid, Motorola's first Android based phone for Verizon Wireless. The Droid makes a great pairing with a Google Voice funded by AdMob ads, designed by Gizmo5 engineers for almost any cell phone, home phone or computer you can find.

Can you spell world domination? Google can.

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