Here’s one Google gift that can actually save you money. The company added SMS messaging functionality to Gmail chat, allowing users to send and read replies in a Google hosted chat window, rather than through your wireless carrier’s pipes.  It even stores the conversations in your chat history.  For this to work, the Gmailer has to start the back-and-forth, and it only works for U.S. phone numbers. Think of all the text overage fees one could save by doing workday texting from a Web browser. Your friends will realize you’re doing something odd—all of your texts will arrive from a Google-generated phone number—but they’ll get used to it, and hey, it's yet another topic for text conversation: “WTF R U doin w/that #?”