Google Wave and Google Buzz may have had troubles attracting usage, but the new ability to place calls from GMail appears to have caught on quickly.
"Over 1,000,000 calls placed from Gmail in just 24 hours!" Google tweeted Thursday, evidently pleased with the number.
For comparison, there are somewhat more than 300 million people in the United States. If the average person makes 10 calls per day--research in 2008 put the number at 208 calls per month--that means about one out of every 3,000 calls in the U.S. went through the service on its first day.
The service lets Gmail users make free calls to U.S. and Canada and inexpensive calls to phones in other countries. It uses Gmail as an interface and optionally can integrate with Google Voice to receive calls as well.
To be sure, a lot of calls are placed daily in the United States, where the new Gmail feature was activated initially. But the figure indicates that a sizable number of the millions of Gmail users at least gave it a whirl even if they didn't decide it was time to stop paying for their other phones.
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Google: 1 million Gmail calls on first day
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