Texting from Gmail

Gmail has just introduced a new feature on their site that allows a person to enter a phone number as a contact. When the contact goes offline if you have their number saved an option comes up allowing you to send an SMS format message to their phone. This technology is not new but what is unique about it is that google automatically issues you a number when you first use this service and sends that number with your message every time unlike other services which send a random code with each message. This may not seem important but it allows the reciever of the messages to then add you to their contacts and send reply messages. Upon testing the service only takes about 3 seconds to put the message through, incredibly fast for computer to phone messaging.