Google has announced that Gmail users will be able to make free phone calls to the U.S. and Canada through 2011. When calling was added to Gmail back in August, the company said that it’d be making such calls free “for at least the rest of the year,” with per minute rates starting at $0.02 per minute for international dialing.
The service made a major splash initially, with 1 million calls placed in the first 24 hours and pundits predictably calling the service a potential Skype killer. That said, we haven’t heard many updates about the traction the service is getting since then, though free calling for all of 2011 certainly stands to lure more users.