So, normally I wouldn’t publicly post an entry like this one, but, I’m not so worried about it because of what it opens up.
I got into the GrandCentral beta. For those who don’t know, basically GC is a sort of man-in-the-middle service for your phone. You’re provided with a phone number that is supposed to be the last number you’ll ever need. You can set up this phone number to forward to other phones, so as your phones change in life (new cell service, new job, new home phone), your one phone to rule them all never changes.
If you leave the area code, well, you might want a new number that’s local to people where you’re at and then the whole thing is kinda worthless anyways, but hey, that probably isn’t happening too often to most people, and long-distance calls are more and more common and cheaper now in a sense, but that’s a side point.
So, now I have this phone number, which happens to be (505) 796-8195. I don’t feel any real concern with putting this number out here, because I’m able to put some barriers up with it. When you call, if you’re not in my address book (and you probably aren’t, I haven’t done a lot with it yet in terms of data entry), it’ll prompt you to speak your name. I’ll then be able to answer the phone and hear who is calling before you know I’m there. I’m then able to take the call, take it and start recording (and it announces the recording to both people, no stealth records here), push you to voicemail, or even push you to voicemail but also listen in on the voicemail and pick up the call if I decide I want to talk to you after all.
As for the caller ID, by default it’ll show me your number, but I can choose to have it show me my GC number so that I know it’s a GC call before taking action.
You can categorize people into four groups (which aren’t adjustable but may be eventually): Family, Friends, Work, Others. You can then set up all sorts of settings based on groups (so family ring all of my phones but work only hits my work number, etc), and you can also go into individual people in the address book and adjust their settings on a personal level. You can even mark people as spam callers and/or block them outright, even playing the “This number is no longer in service” message if you so choose.
Also, it turns your ten-digit number into an email address, so if you were to take those ten digits stripped of all of the characters, like 5057968195, and you were to prepend them to an at-symbol that is suffixed with grandcentral.com and use that as an email address, it forwards to me.
There are a number of features — I could keep going, but I’ll just say to visit grandcentral.com and look around.
So, if you ever call me, start calling me on that number. I’m kind of wanting to try it out and see how it goes. It doesn’t support SMS (yet), so if you’re texting me, stick to the number you already have (which I won’t be posting here, that’s a bit too personal for public posts).
If you’d like to give GrandCentral a try of your own, I still have eight invites. It asks me for three pieces of information: First Name, Last Name, and Email Address. I may not have all (or heck, any) of this information for you all, so if you want it, please send me an email (don’t comment) with that information and I’ll get you an invite — at least, until I run out.