But lots of changes are coming. Google Voice should roll out publicly shortly. Users may be able to port their existing phone numbers to Google if they choose. Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 will give the service a client soft phone plus enhanced VoIP capabilities. And who knows what part Google Voice will play in in the upcoming Google Phone.

So a little housekeeping is in order. And the first item on the checklist is to shut down the GrandCentral website on December 31, 2009. Users were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but old GrandCentral messages are still on the old site. So if you want to keep them, Google suggests you download them soon.

The email:

From: voice-noreply@grandcentral.com
Date: November 20, 2009 11:55:25 PM PST
To:
Subject: The GrandCentral website is shutting down – GrandCentral is now Google Voice.

Dear GrandCentral User:

We’re writing to let you know that we will be closing down the GrandCentral website as of December 31, 2009.

All GrandCentral accounts were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but since that time, you’ve still been able to log-in to your GrandCentral account and listen to old messages there. You will no longer be able to log-in to your GrandCentral account after December 31. Because of this, we strongly suggest downloading any messages or contacts that you want to keep in the next 43 days.

We will send you another reminder before closing down the site, but we suggest you take action now to download any information you want to keep.

- The Google Voice Team

And since we love Google Voice so much, I think it’s ok if we say goodbye to GrandCentral by looking back at the many times over the years that we’ve poked fun at the service. A few of my favorite missteps made by the awesome service from the GrandCentral archives:

GrandCentral A Little Too “Beta” For Some

GrandCentral’s “One Number For Life” Not Really

GrandCentral Homeless Stunt Worked So Well It’s Time For An Encore

GrandCentral Offline: If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead

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The “Change your number” functionality, as spotted today by Boy Genius Report, is great news for users like me. Unfortunately, it will cost you to change it. There’s a one-time $10 fee, which in my mind is well worth it. Best of all, Google Voice will activate your new number right away and still keep your old one active and forwarding to the new one for three months.

What’s also nice is that in picking your new number, you can search by area code and by a word that you want your number to contain. So for example if I search for area code 408 and the word “tuna,” I can get a 408 number that ends in 8862 (”T-U-N-A” on a keypad).

Here are the details:

There is a $10 one-time fee to change your Google Voice number. Here is how it works:

• Pick a new number in the area codes we have.
• Pay $10 with Google Checkout, using your credit card.
• Your new number becomes active right away.
• Calls to your old number will keep coming to your Google Voice account for three months, so you have time to tell everyone about your new number.

We’re still waiting on number portability (the ability to use your existing numbers as Google Voice numbers), but this is a nice start.

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One of the few necessary evils that accompanies the uber-cool and recently launched Google Voice service (which was officially released in March) is the necessity to convert all of your numbers (cell, landline, office) to one number. It can be an annoying and daunting task to change your cell phone number, especially if you are reliant on your cell for business and personal communications. Mobile startup Skydeck’s new mashup with Google Voice may help you avoid the hassle of changing at least your cell phone number while still letting you use Google Voice.

While Google Voice is all your numbers online, Skydeck’s service, which came out of beta earlier this year, is just your cell phone online. Via an app on your cell phone, all your calls, text messages, voicemails and contacts are backed up on Skydeck.com and you can search, read, and reply to your messages (by voice or by text) from Skydeck as if it were your cell phone. If you don’t answer a call, Skydeck takes a voicemail, converts the speech to text, and sends you an email. If you are at your desk, you can call or text people from Skydeck. The call appears to come from your cell phone, so your friends will know who it is. Similar to Google Voice, you read a transcribed version of each voicemail (via SpinVox). It works best on Blackberry and Android phones (although most of the features work on nearly any phone), and costs $9.95 a month. By offering a free service to Google Voice users, Skydeck hopes to acquire new customers who may be receptive to its service.

The catch with Skydeck is that it can’t help you with your other phones, i.e. office and home lines, and the full version of Skydeck isn’t free (like Google Voice). Google Voice, which was formerly GrandCentral (a service Google acquired for $50+ million in 2007) ties all your phones together with one new number that rings them all. It definitely simplifies your phone correspondence and management. That is, once you switch over all of your numbers to a new number.

You give out the one phone number, administer it with a website or voice menu, and forward calls to various devices depending on who’s calling and when. Google Voice lets you accept and send text messages, transcribes voicemails, and lets you specify settings for certain callers (whether they go directly to voicemail). In addition, Google Voice’s interface is a comprehensive Gmail-like inbox (and is also added to the list of links in your Google Apps) with tabs for voicemail, SMS, Recorded calls, Placed calls, Received calls and Missed calls. And all SMS and transcribed voicemails are searchable and taggable.

Both Skydeck and Google Voice are extremely useful services, especially considering the slow death of voicemail. But if you use your cell phone most of the time and don’t want to go through the hassle of changing your phone number and operating it through Google Voice, Skydeck now offers you the option of using a free or paid version Skydeck to manage your cellphone and Google Voice to manage your other phone lines. Skydeck will configure your phone so that the calls you miss on your cell will go to Google Voice. Messages will still be copied to Skydeck so that your cell phone calls, texts and voicemails are in the same place.

While I wish I could not have to change my cell phone number and still have all the numbers in my life be controlled by one service (like Google Voice), I have realized that I can’t have my cake and eat it too. One of the sole drawbacks to Google Voice is the requirement to change your phone number and for those of you who, like me, completely rely on your cell phone and don’t own a land line, that’s a big sacrifice. In a way, Skydeck’s offering gives you the best of both worlds. And you can access most of the key features of Skydeck, mashed up with Google Voice, for free.

Here’s a video which demos the new mashup:

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The 21 month delay between acquisition and relaunch was, unfortunately, expected. Like most Google acquisitions, the service has been rebuilt from the ground up, a lengthy process that has in the past taken an average of 16 months or so.

Now, though, Google is ready to fully launch Grand Central/Google Voice. Key new features have been added that make the service absolutely compelling (each is described below). The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” Grand Central gives you one phone number that can access all your numbers, whether they be cell, home, mobile, and work numbers; the GrandCentral numbers stay the same, as many of these number change over the course of a user’s lifetime. Here’s our quick and dirty guide to using the old GrandCentral.

Most people have never used the service, because Google froze new accounts after the acquisition. The freeze isn’t being lifted yet (and we’ve heard there are tens of thousands of people on the wait list). But starting Thursday existing accounts are being given the option of switching to the new service and gett access to the new features. Over the next several weeks Google will begin to let new people in. Some people, impatient to try out the new service, have been paying as much as $650 on Ebay for an account.

The service was free and is still going to be free. Users can purchase credit (much like Skype) to make international calls at rates far below what they normally pay. GrandCentral will also remain solely a U.S. service.

New Features:

Google’s added new features and plugged some big holes that limited the original service. Some of the more useful and innovating new features (and see screenshots at end):

Text Messaging: Google wants people to use their Google Voice phone number exclusively (and in fact it’s the only way to use it properly). A problem with the original service – it didn’t allow text messaging, so you had to tell people your mobile number as well if you wanted to send and receive text messages with them. Now, Google Voice will accept text messages and forward them on to your mobile phone. You can respond to those messages as well. Google is using the existing Gateway technology (which is used by Google Chat) to power this feature.

Voicemail Transcription: Google also added a nifty transcription feature (which is using the same subscription service as Google 411) for voicemails. All voicemails are transcribed easily saved into the system and searchable. Users can add notes or tags to voicemails and each transcription details how confident Google is about the success of voice transcription; Google Voice highlights word in lighter color that they are not confident were subscribed properly. And transcription takes about 30 seconds to be seen in the system from the end of a voicemail. All in all, Google may have unkilled the dreaded voicemail.

Friend Settings: Google has added new settings that allow users to route calls from specific people straight to voicemail, or your mobile phone, etc, instead of having to state their name and then be forwarded accordingly.

New User Interface: The primary user interface for Google Voice is through your phone via an audio menu. But users can also log in to the website to administer the account and view activity. This interface has undergone a makeover – It now looks very much like a comprehensive Gmail inbox with tabs for Voicemail, SMS, Recorded calls, Placed calls, Received calls and Missed calls. And the Google Voice is easily integrated into the list of links to Google apps at the top left of each application. All SMS and transcribed voicemails are searchable and taggable, which is very useful and will change the way people interact with these messages. Google also says that full integration with Gmail is coming, but won’t say when. Personally, having all my email, SMS and transcribed voicemails in a single inbox could be life-changing. You can also respond to text messages from the interface and initiate phone calls, which then calls your designated phone and then the recipient.

Conference and International Calls: Google Voice also added a conference calling feature allowing conference calls of up to six participants and recording abilities. International calls can also be made through the system at very reasonable rates. For example, voice calls to France are $0.02 per minute, to France mobile phones $0.15 per minute, and to China $0.02 per minute. These rates are about the same as Skype’s international phone rates.

Our First Impression:

Google is finally bringing us the voice service that was promised back in 2006. With GrandCentral, you no longer have to wrestle with 3 or more phone numbers and multiple email and texting devices. You give out one phone number, administer it with a website or voice menu, and forward calls to various devices depending on who’s calling and when.

Google has also fixed most of the limitations with the original service. Outages are a thing of the past, they say, and there won’t be any further reassigning of phone numbers. The new SMS feature means you don’t have to give out your mobile phone separately. And the voicemail transcription and search feature is a great addition.

Still, users have to get over a big initial hurdle – getting all their friends to start using a new phone number instead of the old ones. Business cards are to be thrown out, new ones printed. Contact cards updated. Etc. There’s nothing Google can do to fix this problem.

But they can prove that the service is reliable. No dropped calls. No outages. Proper support even though its a free product. If they do that they can conceivably control the phone numbers for millions of people…and eventually find a way to monetize all that power.

We have 100 Google Voice accounts to give out to readers, but you must have a gmail account. If you’d like one, please send an email from your gmail account to techcrunch@gmail.com (note that this isn’t an account we check regularly) with the exact subject “Google Voice Account” – the first 100 will get an account invitation from Google. Update: We’ve now received several thousand email requests, so the 100 are gone.

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Update: the Labs team found a glitch and is pushing the release back a bit (’probably within two weeks’).

Update 2: make sure you read the open letter the Webmail team at AOL writes to Google. It’s supposed to be funny, I guess, but it’s really not and quite unprofessional to boot.

Turning the option on in your Gmail account settings apparently enables you to send an SMS as soon as you start typing a phone number into Chat’s search box. When you enter new phone numbers, it will save the digits in your contact entries as well. This means that when contacts go offline, the chat window will give you the option to switch to SMS.

Our invitation for a live demo was lost in the mail, but Webmonkey has been given a demonstration of the experimental feature by Gmail product manager Keith Coleman and adds:

The first time you send a text message, it will appear on the person’s phone as coming from a number in the 406 area code. Google has made several thousands of these numbers available for Gmail users, and once a number is associated with your account, all of the text messages you send through Gmail will come from that number.

The 406 number works both ways, so your friend can reply to you via text message. Also, your friend can save that number in their phone as belonging to you, and they can even use it to initiate new chats with you.

We haven’t been able to try this out ourselves yet, but Google does list the text messaging feature on its ‘What’s new in Gmail Labs‘ page (only for US phones, for now).

This is probably one of the first results we’re seeing from Google’s acquisition of GrandCentral (dating back to June 2007 already).

No official word yet on the Gmail blog (the GrandCentral blog has been silent since last April), but we suspect an announcement and general roll-out to follow soon.

(Image credit: monkey_bites)

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The strange part is this – while Ribbit executives are denying the acquisition to the press, they’ve simultaneously been (quite happily) telling all their friends that BT has acquired them for $55 million, says a source who’s heard the story.

BT plans to use the Ribbit platform to build out a GrandCentral competitor, they’ve said. GrandCentral, a service that manages all of your phone services, was acquired by Google in July 2007 for $50 million. Since the acquisition, however, GrandCentral has gone nowhere – no new features and intermittent down time are the only GrandCentral milestones over the last year.

From past experience, this suggests a deal is in the process of closing but isn’t legally done yet, which gives executives the ability to deny acquisition rumors. But like most leaks, the company getting bought just can’t not tell their friends (loosely defined) all about it. Confidentially, of course.

Ribbit has raised $13 million in capital.

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When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems – which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program.

But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally – let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.

How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”

Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message – “Just left you a VM, it’s important” – just so you know it’s there.

There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks.

The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert voicemail into text and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag Yap and Jott, for example).

More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).

For now most people don’t have voicemail transcription services. So think before you voicemail, more and more people just find it annoying.

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We’ve noted problems with the service in the past, but never a general outage. The site is down. The service is down. Everything appears to be offline.

If you want to be a phone company, and get your users to rely on you to manage all of your incoming calls, this simply cannot happen. There are undoubtedly going to be a lot of very upset homeless people this morning, as well as GrandCentral’s other users.

GrandCentral’s blog is offline as well. If Google wants users to take the service seriously in the future, they should make some kind of announcement on their main blog letting users know what happened and when they can expect the service to be back.

Update: service is back online sometime before noon PST. Still no word from them on the cause of the outage.

Update 2: Cofounder Craig Walker posts the following on the GrandCentral blog:

I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service.

Thanks for your patience with us and we’ll continue to work to make the service better by the day. – Craig Walker

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Two years ago they offered to give homeless people free access to their (already free) service. It worked so well (4,000 signups) that yesterday they announced it all over again.

This time Mayor Newsom threw in a bunch of sound bites about how this will “empower” the homeless, improve their morale, etc. (last time they were only able to get Newsom’s deputy chief of staff to comment).

To be clear, I think it’s great that Google is trying to help out the homeless. But what I really applaud is the marketing audacity it takes to announce that you are making an already free service free for the homeless. And then do it again two years later. And to do it even though homeless people already have access to free voicemail through at least one nonprofit organization.

I wonder if Google can pull off the same stunt in the future for new products. Free cloud storage for the homeless, anyone?

Update: Good comment by Scott Rafer below with a different viewpoint:

Please check with local experts when they are available. It’s all about SF politics, and the gimmick is Mayor Newsom’s not Google’s. I’m generally a supporter of this mayor, but his terrible Care-not-Cash program ripped prepaid mobile phones out of the hands of many working homeless — the people who have the best shot to get themselves out of trouble. They are often doing day work for employers who know the phone numbers at the homeless shelters and will not call them or accept calls from them.

GrandCentral and similar services provide the Mayor with some air cover and are at least a mediocre replacement for prepaid phones in this use case.

Update 2: GrandCentral cofounder Craig Walker responds in the comments.

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In contrast to their competitor, Jaxtr, they’ve been mainly spreading through a series of direct deals with social networking sites (Match.com, Tagged, AdultFriendFinder, and Fubar) and a Facebook/Bebo application (potentially on 80 million profiles). Jaxtr, on the other hand, has been spreading mainly through email links and personal websites (5 million users in under 5 months).

Now they’ve forged a deal to be featured on the maverick of dating sites, PlentyOfFish. PlentyOfFish is like every other dating site you’ve heard of, but free. Free has actually paid off pretty well for founder Markus Frind, who runs the site from his Vancouver apartment and takes in over $10 million a year in advertising.

Comscore ranked the site the number one dating site in December 2007, with an average of 1.3 billion page views a month (70,000 sessions and 3 million page views an hour).

Jangl’s widget will let daters call each other, send SMSs, and leave voice mails all without sharing a real number. The functionality makes it easy to take the next step in a relationship without sacrificing privacy, or just discreet phone sex. Calls will be terminated on Jajah’s servers as part of their existing relationship. Like PlentyOfFish itself, Jangl will be monetizing the service through text advertising; a first for the company. On other sites, the service is either ad-free or paid for as part of membership (match.com).

I’ve found social calling widgets (particularly Jaxtr and Jangl) to be the most attractive part of the VOIP market because they’re not competing in a race to the lowest calling rates, but adding real utility to our existing phone lines. Other voice widgets include Ccube, Tringme, and Snapvine. While monetization is still somewhat up in the air, both companies are testing out business models (paid Jaxtr minutes, or Jangl’s revenue sharing). Going forward we’ll see which models do and don’t work. I also expect both companies to continue adopting more advanced features similar to Google’s GrandCentral.

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Nearly every VOIP related startup has their own click-to-call widget, Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, and even GrandCentral. These widgets let you easily and sometimes anonymously set up a call with friends over the web. They’re very useful and come packed with features like voicemail and texting. However, each of these services connects phones to phones, which still eats away at your mobile minutes while you’re talking to that business contact or MySpace hottie.

TringMe offers a bit more flexibility. Callers can ditch their phone and call directly through their Flash widget to your mobile phone, landline, and GTalk (Yahoo and Skype coming soon). All they need is a microphone and one click. Although they’re still in private beta, you can try the demo widget to the right for an idea of the experience.

Similar to the other services, your phone number is kept private and the calls are free (now’s the time for that overseas call). You can also set the widget to just receive voicemails, which are emailed to you, saved on your standard mailbox, or recorded and played back in GTalk. There is one major drawback, though. Since there is no virtual phone number involved, callers have to be at a computer and can’t call you while they’re on the go.

Naturally such an easy and anonymous calling service is susceptible to abuse, and I don’t see any countermeasures in place to keep out prank calls and telemarketers. The other services have verified phone numbers and white/black lists to keep abuse to a minimum. I expect TringMe will have to incorporate similar controls to make people more comfortable with using the widget.

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Troy Schneider received such a notice, advising him that in 8 days his GrandCentral number would be canceled and that he would be required to immediately start using a new number allocated to him. Judi Sohn received the same message: with no prior warning she had 8 days left on her existing phone number then it would cease to operate. Sohn was fortunate to some extent: Google has offered to pay for the reprinting of her business cards, but that would appear to be a one off, and a token gesture at that.

The inconvenience of losing a telephone number, particularly for a business, is more than just stationery. Paper telephone listings must be changed (some people still use them), sign writing must be fixed, and every single listing of the old number has to be found and changed. Most land line telephone providers would offer a redirection service for the old number, however with Google it’s simply a matter of 8 days then no more phone number. Every customer that tries calling the old number post cancellation and cannot connect to the business is potentially a lost sale.

There was no comment at the time of writing from Google or GrandCentral. Ironically the last post on the GrandCentral blog talks about the wonders of being able to keep a GrandCentral Number for life.

Update: Founder Craig Walker comments below and notes that this affected on 434 users:

Everybody, thanks for your comments and I want to quickly reply to try to clear the air regarding this issue. I’ll post a full blog about this on the GrandCentral site in just a bit, but first I want to assure everybody that we are NOT disconnecting anyone’s service. Unfortunately we received word recently that one of our partners was stopping their service in part of the country and since that time we’ve been working to port those phone numbers to other partners. We’ve done this successfully for the vast majority of those users but unfortunately there were approximately 400 users whose numbers could not be ported (434 to be exact). As soon as we found out these users could not be ported to other partners, we contacted those users, set up an alternative GrandCentral number in the same area code for them, and gave them a reply email to request additional GrandCentral number choices. Vincent (our COO and Co-Founder) and I have been personally replying to these emails to help make this transition easier. This would have been these case whether or not we were acquired. We completely sympathize with any pain or disruption this might cause these users and will continue to work directly with them to help find a solution. I will post more on our blog shortly, but wanted to give you all a quick heads up.

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We still don’t have confirmation of a price, but we’ve heard it’s in the Jotspot range – $50 million or more.

When the deal is announced we’ll hopefully hear details on planned integration with Gtalk, Gmail, etc.

Our overview of GrandCentral features is here.

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The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a real cost. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time.

The company, which has raised less than $6 million in capital from Minor Ventures (the exact amount has never been disclosed), beta launched just last September. Earlier this year mainstream press and blogger attention heated up.

The company may have received too much press attention before the product was ready, and we reported on some backlash from beta users abandoning the service in March. Still, the company pushed ahead, launching a mobile product and other features.

GrandCentral was recently pitching a second round of financing to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, but broke off discussions abruptly as the Google talks heated up.

I’m speculating on where Google will use GrandCentral, but the synergies with Gmail and GTalk are fairly obvious and could be the next step in Google’s competition with Skype and other instant messaging platforms.

This is, in my opinion, a great move by Google. Grand Central is an awesome productivity and simplifies the lives of users with multiple phones by giving them a single phone number and letting them handle calls via rules. It’s a natural fit with GTalk and Gmail.

Google won’t comment on this story. I have an email in to GrandCentral to see if they’ll confirm.

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The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a real cost. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time.

Our follow up coverage wasn’t entirely positive. In late March we noted some hiccups with the service that led some beta testers to abandon it. But we’ve continued to use the service, covered its mobile site launch, and in general I think it is one of the standout startups of the last twelve months.

For those of you who aren’t using it yet, I’ve put together my user notes over the last couple of months. There are a lot of features to get used to, and to get the most out of the service you should be aware of at least some of them.

This is a service to keep an eye on – They are certainly still working out some of the bugs, but the GrandCentral team has created a truly useful service with less than $6 million in capital. I would not be surprised, given this acquisition climate, to see someone pick them up in the near term.

Here’s the TechCrunch Quick Guide to GrandCentral:

Getting Started

GrandCentral will be free for light users, but most users will end up paying $10/month for the service once a lot of people start using it as the primary way to contact you by phone.

The center of the Grand Central universe is your Grand Central phone number. This is (theortically) the last phone number you will ever give out, so picking one that you like is important. The GC registration process begins by picking an area code or U.S. state. Once you’ve done that, GC will show you a number of available phone numbers. If you want to see if any of the numbers spell anything interesting or memorable, check out this site, which will show you various words made from the numbers.

After you’ve chosen your GC phone number you go through a standard registration process and then tell GC your home, work and cell phone numbers. When someone calls your GC phone number, GC will ring your real phones based on rules you set.

The Basics

A big hurdle to using GC is the fact that no one knows it’s your new phone number, and they keep calling your old number. To get the maximum benefit from the service you need to route as many calls through it as possible. The only way to do that is to let your contacts know that your new GC number is the best way to reach you. Before you send out a mass email and reprint a thousand business cards, though, make sure you plan on sticking with the service.

The next thing you need to do is record a greeting that people will hear when they call the number. You can customize greetings by specific callers or groups, so business callers can get one message, and friends can get another.

You’ll also want to import your address book. Supported formats are Outlook/Outlook Express, Yahoo, Gmail, vCards and CSV files. You can also add contacts manually.

Then you set up rules for phone calls. Have business contacts always ring your cell phone. Have family ring all of your phones. Friends go to your home number. Or whatever. You can also set certain people to go right to voicemail if you never want to talk to them directly.

You can also temporarily set all of your calls to go immediately to voicemail or to forward to another phone (this is great if you are out of town).

Handling Calls and Voicemails

Once you start taking calls you will fall in love with the service.

When someone calls your number they are asked to record their name unless they are recognized as a contact by caller ID. Your phones then start ringing based on the rules you’ve set. When you answer, the GC automated system tells you who is calling and asks you what you want to do with it. You can either accept it, send it to voicemail, send it to voicemail and listen in, or accept it and record the call. Hitting “4″ during a call turns recording on or off. If you are listening in on a voicemail, just hit “*” and you can jump into the call.

Voicemails are sent to your inbox – they can be reviewed by calling in or via your computer (see “mobile” below as well). All voicemails can be forwarded to others, or you can request an embed code to place it on a website.

GrandCentral has said that they will soon be releasing a feature that automatically transcribes voicemails into text and will deliver them to you via email or SMS.

Mobile Access

GrandCentral recently released a Mobile product. Visit grandcentral.com/mobile via a mobile browser and get a stripped down version of your inbox and other core features.

You can listen to and administer your voicemails directly from this mobile web page, without dialing into your voicemail system directly.

Advanced Features

GrandCentral also has a number of advanced features that will appeal to some users.

• CallSwitch: Hit “*” while talking and your other phones will ring. You can then answer any of them and the call will transfer over
• WebCall: embed a call button on your website and let people call you (the caller will not see your phone number)
• Gizmo: GC will use your Gizmo ID as a forwarding phone number – get calls on your computer (great when traveling abroad)

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Like Gmail’s mobile site, GrandCentral Mobile is a lightweight version of your normal account and the primary use of it will be to review and administer voicemails. All of the normal functionality is included (view and play messages, reply, forward, flag, delete, etc.) You can also access your address book and make basic ringing and greeting account changes. Voicemails are in MP3 format, so your phone will need to be able to play MP3s if you want to listen to them.

The interface provides “visual voicemail” which is one of the anticipated features of the upcoming iPhone (see our coverage of GotVoice from last month, with similar features).

Another cool feature of GrandCentral: set your cell phone voicemail feature to forward calls to your GrandCentral phone number. That way all of your voicemails will be kept in one place even if people still use your cell phone number. GrandCentral does not simply re-ring your cell when you make this setting.

Our recent coverage of the company is here.

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The idea is simple, and compelling for many people with lots of phone numbers. GrandCentral will issue you a new local phone number for free. You then connect your existing phone numbers to the GrandCentral number in your account, and give the new number out to all of your contacts. When someone calls your GrandCentral phone number, rules that you set determine what happens to the call. If it’s someone you’ve whitelisted, they’ll go right through to you. If not, they record their name and you listen to it before deciding whether to take the call or send it to voicemail. Also, GrandCentral will call all of your old phones simultaneously, so you can choose which one to pick up.

GrandCentral came out of private beta a couple of weeks ago and got great mainstream press coverage. David Pogue at the New York Times may have doubled the valuation of their next venture capital round when he he wrote “It’s a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.” In a private message to Tim O’Reilly, Pogue said “I’m using, of course, GrandCentral, which was the topic of my column today. It’s pretty awesome–I’d think you might be a prime candidate, too!” O’Reilly then went on to say “Web 2.0 Address Book May Have Arrived” in describing the service.

That NYT article convinced a lot of people to try it out. Over the last week, I’ve had ten or so contacts email me with their new GrandCentral number, and asked me to use that going forward. But there’s a real cost to getting everyone to change their phone numbers for you. And there are other costs, such as re-printing business cards, etc., that have to be considered as well. So while I continue to test the service, I haven’t started asking contacts to use it.

GrandCentral May Have Some Kinks To Work Out

I was surprised when two of the people who sent out their new GrandCentral number to me and other contacts sent a follow up email a few days later, asking everyone to ignore the phone number and go back to the previous normal cell or other phone. I followed up with both of them to ask why they were abandoning the service.

One person, who uses his desk and cell phone “constantly” to do business, said that it only worked properly about half the time. When you whitelist phone numbers, they are supposed to ring right through without having to record their name or wait. Even with their caller ID turned off, callers on his white list said they were still being put in the queue. Important clients, who were supposed to bypass the review, were getting pissed off. “I just couldn’t afford the risk” he said. “When I kept hearing the recorded name of my most important client and realize he’s waiting on hold while I stumble for the “1″ button to put him through, I knew I couldn’t keep using it.” he also said that clients were complaining that calls weren’t picked up at all and they were being put through to voicemail. “These guys don’t do voicemail” he said. “They simply call my competitor.”

The other contact also complained that the forwarding and review services just didn’t work all the time and he was missing important calls. He also said that the call transfer service, where you hit “*” and the call is transferred from your desk phone to your cell phone seemlessly while you run from your office to your car, didn’t really work at all. He also said that when he picked up one phone, say his cell, his desk phone often kept ringing and had to be picked up and then hung up again for it to stop.

Both of these guys rely heavily on their phones and can’t miss calls. They may not be appropriate users of GrandCentral during the open beta period. Both said they’d change back to the service if they knew it would work properly.

In theory, GrandCentral is awesome. But this is one startup where the “beta” tag needs to be taken seriously.

If you have your own positive or negative experiences with GrandCentral, please share them.

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• Incoming phone calls ring on different phones according to which group you’ve placed a caller’s phone number in.
• You can play different voice mail greetings for friends, family and work calls.
• Voice mail is stored indefinitely.
• Voice mail can be listened to and replied to with just a few clicks.
• Voice mail messages can be listened to in real time and you can jump in to initiate a conversation in real time with one click.
• Telemarketers or others can be banished to the spam folder so if you’re called by the same number again your phone will simply not ring.
• You can click to have GrandCentral call both the person who left a message and your phone.
• You can record a section of any call with one button on the keypad of your phone.
• You can seamlessly switch from one of your phones to another.

A number of these features will really only be useful with repeat callers, but not all. I think that’s a pretty impressive feature set.

Accounts created now are free for 60 days (no credit card required) and will cost $25 for 1000 minutes or $15 per month for unlimited use. There will also be a free, 100 minute per month option indefinitely – though that may only be useful to tell people to call you back on your other number if you decide you don’t like GrandCentral. See below for more discussion of data portability.

GrandCentral was founded by Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, both previously executives at Dialpad Communications, a VOIP service acquired by Yahoo! last year. The company has raised $4 million in funding from Minor Ventures. They fancy themselves to be anti-telco and that’s probably a great way to make friends. Similar services have been offered by other companies in the past, but GrandCentral believes their past success in VOIP combined with the relatively new ubiquity of broadband puts them in a good position.

All of this is well and good, but I asked the founders about a couple of other things readers might find of interest; the ability to leave the service and take your data with you and possible future directions they could explore.

Data portability. One number for life is a nice slogan, but if am going to put a lot of important information into my account at GrandCentral I want to know that I’m going to be able to get it out again. While cell phone numbers can now be ported from one carrier to another, the company told me it is not currently possible to take my VOIP number from them elsewhere if I cancel their service. Users can currently import phone numbers from Outlook or in CSV format and GrandCentral told me they are working on making it possible to export the phone numbers users have captured in the system back out again. I also think that batch export of MP3 voice mails with the metadata I’ve attached is a reasonable expectation.

If GrandCentral seeks to bring the best parts of the web to management of telephony, it would behoove them to include maximum openness and respect for users’ ownership of our own data on that list of qualities. They expressed a willingness to live up to those expectations.

Future directions. Users will soon be able to use GrandCentral to receive faxes as well as voice calls. The company is also looking into social networking type features for their site. We may see people sharing photos, videos and voice recordings on GrandCentral soon. The voice recording feature, by the way, does not alert both parties to a call that the conversation is being recorded. Most states in the US, the company told me, only require that one party consent to a call being recorded – the onus is on the GrandCentral user to obey their local laws. While it might be fun to check out a Digg type rating page for the funniest recorded voice clips from GrandCentral calls – this could also lead to some amount of backlash. There are any number of ways that a phone call can be surreptitiously recorded, but this one is particularly easy. Though some amount of mischievous fun could be lost, I think the company really should require that all parties to a call be notified of recording.

Overall, I think GrandCentral is a remarkably good product. I’ve got an account myself and look forward to using it. Other services that allow web management of voice mail can still ask for too much interaction with your phone, but putting VOIP in the middle is very smart.

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