First, let me apologize to my few reader(s) out of country, but Google Voice is about to get a whole lot better.  From the Google Voice blog comes an announcement that they’ve acquired Gizmo5 (the same service I put off in anticipation of GV), as rumored earlier on Engadget.

Today we’re pleased to announce we’ve acquired Gizmo5, a company that provides Internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers. While we don’t have any specific features to announce right now, Gizmo5′s engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience. Current Gizmo5 users will still be able to use the service, though we will be suspending new signups for the time being, and existing users will no longer be able to sign up for a call-in number.

Since it’s my blog and I allow myself to speculate at will, I’m predicting that Gizmo5/Google Voice will merge into a single platform, offering a desktop solution for VOIP calling from your Google Voice.  As Engadget predicted, I think it’s going to be a strong poke at Skype who may still be going through some legal issues.

Further speculation leads me to believe that Google is trying to rush into something big, *cough* Chrome OS *cough.* With Gizmo5, they should be able to pollish off a couple months (maybe a year) on development of a VOIP platform.  Add this to the slew of services with good some good integration, possibly using an AIR application platform and you’ll see great success. (I only mention AIR because it is cross-platform, however it is a completely random statement).