- We’ve written about free (ad-supported) VoIP calling previously (When Calls Equal Impressions), but in recent days we’ve seen free SMS from Jaxtr, free 411 from from freeMobile411 (and Sprint!), free music from Nokia/Sony BMG (with EMI coming soon) and not free but unlimited, cheap international calling from Skype, which makes incremental calling essentially free. May we recommend some reading for service providers: Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business, by Long Tail author Chris Anderson.

- Former Googlers are building Mechanical Zoo, a new search engine that takes into account social network data to help deliver better results. Early, but worth watching. Service providers should be positioning themselves to feed information only they have — such as identity, location and billing relationships — into such services, taking a sizable piece of the action for their trouble.

- Google is reworking its iGoogle customizable start page to look and feel more like a social network. Fueling the effort is a new iGoogle developer “sandbox” to speed the delivery of new apps/capabilities to iGoogle. Owning a user’s start page is big business, and one ISPs/telcos are already in, often via partnerships. Back in January (according to ComScore stats via TechCrunch) Yahoo owned 58% of user start pages with Google at 26% and Microsoft at 10%. Meanwhile, smaller start page vendors like Pageflakes are getting bought up. The start page land wars are heating up, there are advertising, upsell/cross-sell value added services and other revenues at stake.