Google gives free voice mail to San Francisco's homeless

From one of my favorite techie blogs at Salon.com, Farhad Manjoo today posted about Google working together with the city of San Francisco to provide free voice mail to to the city's homeless:

"Bless Google for doing something amazing: The company is handing out phone
numbers and voice-mail boxes to every homeless person in San Francisco.
Folks can sign up for the numbers at shelters across the city. The numbers
will be local and personal -- i.e., each person will get a unique 415-area code
number that will never expire.
The number will ring a voice-mail box that
will play a personalized greeting; homeless people can check their messages by
dialing in from any phone."

Great initiative by Google and SF mayor Gavin Newsom, that others can and should emulate!

This idea should be adopted by other cities, surely Verizon and others will be happy to participate in similar initiatives.
In Latin America, this reminds me of an initiative by Carlos Slim's TELMEX, the fixed line operator in Mexico. A few years ago (mid 90's), when they first introduced Voice Mail to their customers, they had a similar service that was actually put to use during national emergencies. People in affected areas were given access to free Voice Mail service so that they could keep in touch with their loved ones.
This initiative was done together with Boston Technology, who later became Comverse, TELMEX's Voice Mail vendor.
A great idea and one final note:
Operators beware! As we mentioned earlier, the on line giants continue to move into the mobile world.