It's taken 21 months—almost two years—but GrandCentral ("One number for all your phones, for life") has finally gotten an upgrade (and a new name). I'm totally excited, and happy that the long-awaited upgrade (previously known as GrandCentral 2.0) is finally here. Meet Google Voice: "One number for all your calls and SMS".

New Features

Yes, Google Voice added several new features. One of the things that always, always bugged me about GrandCentral was the fact that my number couldn't receive or send text messages. Well, now it can. According to TechCrunch's expansive overview, the same technology that powers the SMS in Gmail Chat Labs experiment (known as Gateway) is used in Google Voice.

Other new features include voicemail transcription (sounds promising), very specific per-contact settings (definitely a trap for us OCD types), a completely overhauled interface (w00t! Less Flash!), conference calling (cool factor = 100), and easy dialing out via the phone interface.

I have to stop and talk about the dial-out feature. First of all, it was nearly impossible to dial out from GrandCentral unless you either had a new voicemail from the person you wanted to call (so you could press '2' after it to call them back) or had access to a Web-enabled device. Simply dialing out wasn't considered. Now, in Google Voice, there's a "press '2'" option right in the main menu! Finally!

Also, under GrandCentral's auspices, calling out was free during beta, with the shadow of paying per minute after testing was over looming in the future. Google changed that in Voice, which allows free calls anywhere in the United States. International calls are at greatly reduced rates (compared to conventional long-distance). Each new user gets a free $1.00 credit toward international calls, though I don't know if they'll keep that up once sign-ups are opened completely—it could be something just for migrating GC users.

Migration, Stranded Data, and Missing Features

Existing GrandCentral users get (or will get this weekend) a migration link at the top of their grandcentral.com inboxes, which will begin the automated migration of a GrandCentral number to Google Voice. The process was pretty painless, even smoother than the transition to the new FeedBurner system last month.

However, much data is not migrated. Most of the settings are reset, custom greetings and names must be re-recorded, old voicemails/calls/recorded calls are left behind on grandcentral.com, and contacts must be transferred manually by exporting GrandCentral's Address Book to CSV and importing it into Google Contacts. The automatic merging of imported contacts only merged about half of the duplicates in my set, and I had very few contacts to deal with. That was fortunate, because the rest of the merges had to be found and made manually.

In the future, I hope Google will provide a utility to migrate old voicemails from GrandCentral, especially if grandcentral.com is eventually shut down or redirected. Currently, the top of my GrandCentral inbox says:

Since you have migrated to the Google Voice Preview, you can now access your new messages and update your settings by logging in at google.com/voice. Feel free to continue to access grandcentral.com for your older voicemail messages. We're glad you dropped by.

That's inconvenient. But really, how often do I visit old voicemails? Not much. Besides, a lot of them were inexplicably lost... Their listings are present, but they can't be played; I'm guessing the files somehow went missing. I'm not happy about that, but... at least it hasn't happened again.

A minor annoyance is the loss of custom ringback tones, the sounds played to a caller while the phone is ringing on your end. (Google does have a suggestion to bring this back on the Google Voice Feature Suggestion page.)

Future Ideas

Of course, Google Voice is not without holes. It can't forward to numbers that require extensions (I don't need it now, but might in the future). It can't take an existing number and turn it into a Google number (which would be eminently useful, I think, for my mother).

Image via CrunchBase

There are also no apps for iPhone or Android yet (and I don't care about Blackberry, kthx). But the feature suggest page I mentioned above has all these and more. I've suggested about 75% of the features currently on the list, including integration with Gmail and Google Talk. I'm hopeful that these and more ideas (like the two I posted on Twitter) will be implemented, and sooner rather than later.

Speaking of future ideas, Lifehacker ran a short post yesterday speculating that the reserved "Voicemail" label in Gmail is for integration with Voice. It's actually for Google Talk voicemails (GTalk has a calling feature that I almost never use because of various technological or locational constraints), but it could certainly be useful for Voice messages as well, if Gmail and Voice are ever integrated.

Reaction

Despite the inconveniences, I think I'm going to like the service. It's a vast improvement upon GrandCentral; in fact, TechCrunch's Leena Rao says (in the overview mentioned above), "Google is finally bringing us the voice service that was promised back in 2006." I agree; the old GrandCentral was convenient, but Google Voice promises to be many times as useful.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

Image by elh70 via Flickr

The phone rang.

Normally that would be a simple matter – just pick up the phone, read the Caller ID, and decide whether or not to answer it – but this situation was remarkable in that Caller ID is unavailable at my house. Put more correctly, Caller ID is a subscription service that we do not subscribe to. The cost is several dollars per month, and the phones at home aren't used enough to justify the expense.

So, I must answer the call without knowing who is on the other end. It's usually either GrandCentral or my mother, but this time it's a "robot" call. A recorded voice begins speaking to me. On the off-chance that I will be hanging up on a real person who might at some point ask an actual question, I stay on the line.

I needn't have bothered. Upon coming to a spot in the text where a changing date is to be inserted, the voice pauses, changes, and continues in a vastly different tone. I hung up before the original voice could return.

For a fact, I know that the number I answered is almost certainly on the Do Not Call List, which is supposed to prohibit marketing calls. The only problem is, there's a loophole. Non-profit organizations, pollsters, and political campaigns seem to be allowed to dial blacklisted numbers without fear of repercussions. The content of this particular call is irrelevant; the fact remains that this is not the first time, and will not be the last.

Denying the possibility of prohibiting unsolicited telephone calls altogether (a most appealing option, actually), I honestly believe that there should be an option for numbers on the Do Not Call List (or a second list for the purpose) to block all unsolicited calls, whether made by computer or human. In addition, Caller ID should be a standard feature on all telephone lines, with no extra charge. (See "Caller ID Should Be Standard" for more in-depth coverage.)

With respect to blocking all unsolicited calls, some of us just don't want to be bothered by such an intrusive device unless we know the caller, personally or professionally. If you want to sell me something, convince me to vote for you in an election, or gain my good will and receive a donation of some sort, please take your marketing elsewhere. Interrupt me while I'm on the Internet. No, I do not mean that you should spam me or add me to an email list; I would find such practices just as annoying as unsolicited telephone calls. I mean you should advertise. Buy spots in Google AdWords or something.

See, I don't object to you getting your message out, but rather to the way you're going about doing so. The Internet provides a medium where a) people are used to being interrupted by ads, so they will be automatically less disruptive, and b) there is increased likelihood of your ad being relevant. A random telephone call is most definitely less relevant than a Web ad placed near text that relates to what is being advertised.

Feel free to ask me to donate clothing to your cause, vote for your candidate, or buy the latest and greatest in window-blind technology; just do it in a way that doesn't waste my time or interrupt something I'm already doing.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

Apparently, the announcement was made yesterday, though I missed it. It must be because I checked my feeds in the morning, and the entry was posted in the late evening. Despite the fact that I missed the announcement (and that I haven't been posting lately, another story), GrandCentral now officially lets you share a forwarding number in different accounts.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

Now, I don't know how many of these products will make it into mainstream Google Accounts (I would really like to have GrandCentral connected to my Google Account, personally), but they are very exciting, especially the Gears access for Calendar and Gmail. Who knows how many days of calendar will be downloaded, or how many emails (with or without attachments...), but the features are quite welcome.

Google Page Creator has been pretty anemic for its entire life, and if pages.google.com turns into sites.google.com, I won't complain. Also, offline document editing will allow me to finally ditch Word! (Except for those few niggling instances of complex formatting, of course.) Combine all these Gears integrations, and suddenly the Web browser starts looking like an office suite. The times ahead will be very, very exciting, I think, for Google's users. Hopefully all the improvements start with regular users and work through to Apps, like the new Gmail code...

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

When I first got into using email, I used the old USA.net email service, which was free at the time. When that moved to being fee-based only, my dad created email addresses on his hosted server for myself and my mother. We had to use email clients for those, but didn't really get into the Yahoo! or Hotmail stuff because they weren't really any different from Outlook/Outlook Express.

Fast-forward to 2005, when a friend of mine invited me to Gmail. I added it as an account in Outlook, and enabled POP3 access, then promptly forgot about it. When the hard disk of my computer threatened to crash in 2006, I had to transfer everything to cloud-based services, which meant webmail, and FTP storage for files (I've since gone back to using a school computer and Google Docs in tandem).

Even though the computer was fixed, and the data recovered, I've never gone back to using the client or my old email address. Gmail's innovative conversation view, starring, and labels have changed the way I use email forever, and I can't see myself ever using anything else again (unless of course you guys pull the rug out from under all us Gmail users... Please don't!). I've since redirected every email account possible to Gmail, and really love the spam filters that work 99.9% of the time (I've found about two mistakes, otherwise it would be 100%) to keep junk mailings about drugs, stocks, real estate, etc. out of my life.

Even more wonderful was the fact that, since I started using Gmail, I've been using more and more Google services, and found my life getting easier. Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar, Docs, Reader, Blogger, GrandCentral, and the whole host of others have transformed the very way I communicate and work, and I'd just like to thank you, the Gmail Team, and all the other development teams at Google for creating the Google Operating System I use today.

That's why I'm such a Google fan.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761