Friday, September 21, 2007

Trying out Grand Central

Grand Central is a service that Google recently acquired. It looks rather interesting: they give you a single phone number to give to everyone, whether work, home, or friend-related. You can have the number behave differently based on who's calling as far as which of your numbers they get forwarded to: home, cell, work, etc.. The other main point to all this is that if your cell phone changes, say because you switch carriers, you don't have to have everyone alerted to your new phone number. They just keep calling your Grand Central number like before, and you just point Grand Central to the new cell phone.

My initial reservations are: once they have you reliant on them, will they start charging? If so, how much? And, will they be around 5 years from now? Having just seenYahoo Music Unlimited To Go being end-of-lifed, I wonder what it would mean if I really got hooked on this service and it went away? I suppose it wouldn't be too bad, since I would just have to point everyone back to individual numbers, so perhaps more inconvenience than actual "problem" per se?

So, one thing I'm playing around with is the ability to have a 'Call Me' button posted on the web that keeps my number private but lets others place a call. Feel free to say 'hi' if you want. Perhaps I'll leave it around for the fun of it, or perhaps not.... In any case, we'll see how this all goes.

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