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Remember when phones were used for, you know, phone calls? Janet Hall, senior consultant for TMNG, does. What's more, Hall says that voice communications will rise again away from a commodity to a growth market.

It's been a long time coming, but Google just announced that Google Voice is now open for everyone. Until today, Google Voice was an invite-only service, though Google slowly opened up the doors to more users over the last few months and the service already has over one million users. Starting today, anybody with a Google Account in the U.S. can open a Google Voice account and get a Google Voice phone number without having to wait for an invitation.

Ribbit Mobile, which offers a set of VoIP services that is very similar to Google Voice, just launched its first iPhone app (iTunes link). The app allows users to check their voicemail, read voicemail transcriptions, forward voicemails by email and create a to-call list based on these messages. It uses the iPhone's native phone app to make calls and the default SMS app to send text messages.

Ribbit also gave us 500 invites to hand out to our readers. If you would like to get one, just read on to find out how to claim it.

Ribbit just announced the launch of Ribbit Mobile. Ribbit Mobile is a cloud-based VoIP telephony service that brings together web-based calling, smart call routing and voicemail transcriptions.

It is hard to look at Ribbit Mobile without comparing it to Google Voice. Just like Google Voice, Ribbit gives users a new phone number or they can use call forwarding to transfer calls from their mobile phones to Ribbit's platform. Ribbit Mobile also has quite a few features that Google doesn't offer, including the ability to make calls from within the browser.

Ribbit, the VOIP platform that was bought by British Telecom last year, announced the winners of its $100,000 KillerApps challenge today. The contest was obviously meant to stimulate interest in Ribbit's APIs among developers, and judging from the line-up of winning applications, a lot of developers came up with highly creative ways of using Ribbit's platform in their apps.

It's time to wrap up the week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reviewed a super-hyped new search engine called Cuil, analysed the BT acquisition of web telephony platform Ribbit, looked at why Google bought video startup Omnisio, and investigated why popular Facebook app Scrabulous was shut down. On the trends side we discussed how web apps can work together, checked out Ray Ozzie's latest vision for Microsoft, gave you an overview of 'brandstreaming', and looked at alternatives to Google Knol.