Google has not let its recent setbacks (the closing of Google Wave comes to mind) stop it from launching new services.

Google wants to be more than your search central. It wants to be your communication hub, becoming your one-stop place for interaction with friends and colleagues. This is why it launched Google Buzz, a kind of Facebook/Twitter social web tool based on your Google email account, and this is why it now attacks VoIP phone service Skype by turning Gmail into a regular phone.

All you have to do is to install a voice and video chat plug-in, and you can use your computer’s microphone, loudspeaker and — if needed — video camera to communicate. And yes, a dedicated head set with mike is useful.

Now, Google’s voice and video chat has been around for a while, but its usefulness has been limited. You could only connect with others having a Gmail account. Now US users of Gmail can call anyone with a phone anywhere in the world.

The Google Blog says:

“Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.”

So far Google Buzz hasn’t made much of an impact on the Facebook crowd. May the Gmail phone make Skype users switch to Google? We doubt it, but Gmail users who have not been using Voice over Internet services before, may start using Gmail Phone, and that will tie them even closer to Gmail as their default communication tool. That would in itself be a success for Google.

Google reported that they had clocked 1 million calls made through Gmail during the first 24 hours.