Google's Grand Central: First Impressions

I got my new Google Grand Central account invite today, so I quickly went to setup the account. Setup is simple, first you pick the phone number you want, then you enter your current phone number, they call you and you type in the code they give you. Then you proceede to your personal info and you are done.

I haven't had time to give this service an indepth review, but I did get some strong first impressions.

The goal of this service is "One number for life". GrandCentral gives you a phone number, and you use this as your public phone number. Give it to everybody, friends, family, co-workers.

Then in Grand Central you can add up to 6 of your current phone numbers. These numbers can be home phones, cell phones, work, or anywhere else you commonly hang out at. Grand central will tie all of these numbers into your single grand central numbers. If your home number changes, no problem, edit the number in your grand central account and all calls are automatically routed to your new phone number, nobody needs to be informed.

But, you want customization, right? If your buddies are calling you, you may not want them to reach you at work, but only on your cell or home phone. You don't want people from work to call you and have the office ring, or your spouse to call you from home and have it ring the home phone. You setup various groups, and you tell each group which phone you want them to get ahold of.

This is what groups are for. You assign your contacts to a group, family, work, friends, and others. You cannot, however create your own groups, and I see that as a huge limiting factor. You can adjust the settings on an individual contact basis, but if you have several peopole that you want to have the same setings for, it would be much easier to put them all in a custom group.

Quick Rule

There is a quick rule setting that will override all of your current settings. You can have everything route to voicemail if you don't want to be disturbed, or temporarily route everything to a new number. Then you just turn off the quick rule and everythign goes back to normal.

Custom Greetings

You can setup a custom greeting for each group, so if someone from that group calls and goes to your voicemail they only hear the message that is for that group alone. You can create a custom greeting on a per user basis, just like YouMail (see my previous coverage). One more advantage that YouMail has over Grand Central is that they have a huge selection of pre-recorded messages. These messages don't have the personal touch of recording it yourself, but they are fun for friends and family. With Grand Central you can only record your own messages.

Ring Back Tones

Grand Central offers free ring back tones, called Ringshare, so people calling don't have to listen to a boring normal ring. When Google bought Grand Central they limited this service by taking away the mp3 uploading, to protect themselves from copywrite no doubt, and you have to choose from their library of approved licensed ring back tones. This collection, well, it sucks. You can choose from the rings of 6 different countries, 4 sound effects, and 4 voice recordings. Very limited, no music or anything. If there were more rings, and a huge selection of music then this would be awesome. But at least you do get the chance to assign each group, or individual, it's own ringshare.

Spam Blocker

The entire Grand Central community flags spam messages, and telemarketers and they get added to a spam filter. If someone from this spam filter calls you, their call is not put through to your phone. You can select if you want this service on or off and also you select if the message left by the person is deleted or put into a spam folder. For those of you who hate telemarketers, this is a good way to do it. It's just too bad they can't protect your actual home number, they can only protect the Grand Central account. So, if you constantly get plauged by telemarketers, you may want to consider this free service.

Visual Voice Mails

There is a nice web interface that shows you all the calsl that you ahve and who it is from. This way you can skip straight to the messages you want to hear. You can also save these messages forever and forward them to others.

Block Callers

You can set certain individuals to be blocked, then the person will hear a standard "number out of service" message. It isn't customizable for what message to play, but it works all the same.

Web Call Button

Now this is a neat feature for a business website. You create a button and the person clicks on it, enters their phone number, then Grand Central calls their number and your number. So it puts your customers in contact with you without giving out your number. When you activate this service, it adds itself as another group and you have all the same options. You can change the ring they hear, have a custom voicemail, and select which, if any, phones it rings. If you don't want it to ring your phone you can have it go straigt to voicemail.

Give it a try! Just click this button. Your number is protected as well.



Overview

I can't see this service being useful for an entire family, at least not until you can have custom groups, and I do see some limitations for things outside of business. If you have one phone number that you give out, that rings your home and cell, what if the person at home keeps answering before you can get to it on your cell? You would have to be careful how you setup which group can call each phone.

Overall, I think it would be really helpful if you could create custom groups, but the fact that you can unify all of your phones, and voicemails under a single number can be really beneficial.

YouMail vs Grand Central

It is hard to compare these since they have differnt goals to them.

YouMail is a lot more customizable for voicemails. The visual voicemail works the same, sending you voice messages to your email and allowing you to forward the messages to others and save them for life. With thousands of pre-recorded messages it makes the service more fun. They are trying to allow you to have the same voicemail settings on any phone under your account, including your land line phone, but you still have seperate numbers to deal with.

Grand Central works great for merging all of your numbers and voice mails into a single place, and if you ever change a phone number you just change it in your grand central control panel and you will never have to worry about letting everybody know. I can see this being very usefull for any single guy or business man who is out a lot, but for a family number I don't think it would work as well. Each member in your family would have to have their own account, then maybe it would work better, although if two accounts use the same home number I don't know if Grand Central would complain or not. Grand Central does have a much smoother, nicer looking website, but YouMail's website isn't bad either. Both take a simplistic view on things, which is the way it should be for services such as this. A simplistic website allows for easier customization and navigation.

So as far as which service you should use, I can't tell you that. Decide for yourself. Just keep in mind that Grand Central is in beta testing mode and you can only be invited by a current member. Both services are free so there is no harm in trying them, but there is no way to combine the services to use both.

I'll write a more in-depth review later if I find things that are different than I mentioned here.

P.S. Another benefit of this service, you can click a call button in your address book, enter your phone number and then it calls you, then that person is called. A great way to get ahold of people if you can't make a long distance call.

Until next time, this is Jon signing out and wishing you happy voicemailing!

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