I have to admit, I’ve considered myself “honored” for having been a part of the GrandCentral beta for the past couple of years.

In a nutshell, GrandCentral gave you a (free) phone number for life, let you route that number to any combination of phones (landline, and/or cell), and a unified voicemail system that notified you when you had a message.

Google bought GrandCentral in 2007, and nothing much happened to the service… Most followers thought it died.

Last week, Google announced (in typical, unnecessarily mysterious, vague, and cryptic Google fashion) that GrandCentral was being re-launched as “Google Talk.”

The roll-out was a little rough (to say the least), and (honestly), Google Voice is puzzling:

They seem to tout (albeit, shrouded in mystery) that among the benefits is a unfied contact database.

However, that’s not true… If you have a Google Apps domain account, you cannot share contacts… You still have to maintain two seperate sets of contacts (no different than the GrandCentral days).

That’s puzzling, since “shared contact groups” has been the most requested Google feature for months (FAR more requested than all the goofy stuff showing-up in Gmail Labs)?

Anyway… I’m curious to hear what you think of Google Voice!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.