GrandCentral - One Number For Life

I've been playing around with a service called GrandCentral.com (recently acquired by Google) and so far it's pretty intriguing. Its motto, “One number for life,” pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral, you choose a new, single, unified phone number - you hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes. From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously. No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

As a bonus, all messages now land in a single voice mail box. You can listen to them in any of three ways. First, you can dial in from any phone (a text message arrives on your cellphone to let you know when you have voice mail). You can also play your messages on the Web, at GrandCentral.com, and download them as audio files to preserve for posterity. You can even ask to be notified by e-mail; a link in the e-mail message takes you online to play the voice mail.

The service also has several neat features that, if you're not careful, can turn GrandCentral into a full-blown hobby. I am exploring this service as the first step in possibly cutting our traditional land line service, so stay tuned.

Finally, you may have noticed the new "Call Me" feature on this blog. If you click on that, GrandCentral will ask for your phone number, it will then call you, and then connect you to me - all for free. Neat, huh?