Google’s GrandCentral May Still Have a Future
If you’re not familiar with GrandCentral, it’s a nifty beta (web-based) telephone system Google acquired in July of 2007.
Naturally, those of us using (and loving) the service were excited about the possibilities.
I use GrandCentral here at webgroupWest (it was only made available in the US).
What is GrandCentral? In a nutshell, you sign-up, and get a free phone number associated with your account. From the (web) interface, you can set-up GrandCentral to ring any (of several) phones simultaneously (home, cell, office, etc.), each time someone calls your GrandCentral number.
And that’s just the start… Answer any of those phones, and the others stop ringing. Don’t answer any, and GrandCentral bypasses your phones’ individual voicemail systems, and routes the caller to a custom message you can record yourself.
If your caller leaves a voicemail, GrandCentral can email you a recording of that message, and/or send a text to your cell phone.
The cool features go on-and-on… You can set GrandCentral to “announce” who’s calling, and it lets you decide whether to answer, send that caller directly to voicemail, or block them entirely.
And I’ve barely scratched the surface…. You can even place outgoing calls using your GrandCentral number from any phone associated with your account.
In April of this year, we saw the last post (as of this writing) on the official GrandCentral blog, and at about the same time, Google closed GrandCentral to new sign-ups for the beta program (those of us with existing accounts continue to enjoy the service).
Sadly, there have been no updates to GrandCentral, which seems to have “fallen off the map,” much to the chagrin of its devoted fans. In Google fashion, there’s been no comment from Mountain View.
A number of us have been speculating (“Guessing?”) as to what (if anything) Google has planned for the service (integration with Gmail Contacts & Google Talk would be awesome!), but really, with each passing week of silence, the prospects seems less and less promising.
Today, a number of blogs began to report that Google will introduce GrandCentral in Spain, quoting a Spanish news site (you can get to the original, translated, through Alex Chito’s blog).
Reading the translation, I’m not convinced this is exactly the same GrandCentral I use and love, but just the idea of Google introducing it somewhere… anywhere… is promising.
