Innovative User Verification from Google

Google’s IM client (Google Talk) has gotten all the attention today, but it strikes me that the bigger announcement is the way they will start verifying Gmail accounts – through SMS messages to users’ cell phones.  The rationale is that you can fake other ways of verifying a real person is creating an account, but it’s a lot more effort (and expense) to create fake accounts this way.

It will be interesting to see how the spam gods try to foil this one.  But I applaud Google for being creative.  Perhaps they could take the same approach to prevent splogs?  (That’s fake, spam blogs for my novice readers.)