I don’t really like telephones all that much.  I understand that they are a necessity of modern existence and can be greatly convenient, but that doesn’t make them pleasant.  They ring incessantly and result in virtual slavery to an overly complicated lifestyle.  Keeping track of callers on a home phone, a cell phone and a work phone is a nasty piece of business.  It usually means running two (or three) separate voicemail inboxes.  And there is nothing worse than battling voice mail after a long weekend.  Nothing.

Luckily, Google agrees with me.  In 2006, Google acquired a California based start-up called GrandCentral.  GrandCentral had a pretty simple vision of phones: they should work for people.  That means one number that never changes, for life.  Here’s the vision: landlines change, cell phones change and work numbers change.  It is far more convenient to provide people with a single number that can ring to work, home and cell.  One number instead of three.

GrandCentral did all sort of other nifty things too, like send e-mails when a new voice mail arrived, let you transfer calls between phones, screen callers before choosing to answer, and automatically direct individuals based on who they are or what day it is (useful for sending the boss to voice mail after 5:30 pm).  Even David Pogue of the New York Times had nice things to say.

But for everything it did well, GrandCentral also had some rough edges.  For one, it didn’t support text  messages. Thus, when I experimented with GrandCentral a year ago, I also had to give out my cell-phone number.  And while I would tell people to call me on the GrandCentral line, said people preferred to call me on the cell phone.  After all, they wanted to make sure that I would answer; never mind that GrandCentral would ring to my cell office and home all at the same time.

At some point. Google decided that they would overhaul the service and GrandCentral shuttered its doors to the public.  And while the service remained active for people who were already subscribers, I found that GrandCentral became a fancy business number due to its limitations.  Today, after nearly 21 months of development, Google announced GrandCentral 2.0: Google Voice.  I think it’s fair to say that Google’s developers took off the rough edges.

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Tags: Digital Lifestyle,Google Voice
Categories: Computer, Cool Stuff, Raves
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