Lots of outlets seem to have picked up the story about the new Vonage iPhone app that lets you call your Facebook friends free. I don’t understand why this is even newsworthy. There are a bunch of free VOIP apps for iPhone already, with Skype being the one that comes to mind first. But a couple of other things have me scratching my head about this story:
- AT&T doesn’t offer the unlimited data plan for iPhone anymore, so this “free” call could end up being pretty expensive over 3G.
- If you’re making a call to another friend with the iPhone app, then your friend probably has an iPhone. They’re also probably also on AT&T, so a regular voice call to them would be free anyway. So just call them?
This might make more sense to me if your friend is outside the US, or they come out with a similar app for other platforms, but even then… so what? Free VOIP calls aren’t new. Is it just the Facebook tie-in? I don’t get the buzz. Maybe it’s because I have 5,000 rollover minutes with AT&T.
Evan Hoffman's Blog 