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Ah, Activity from GrandCentral!

As you know, I’m a fan of GrandCentral, the one number for life follow me service that was acquired by Google back in July of 2007.  The acquired it and basically told NOONE what they were doing with it.

GrandCentral allows you to grab a local-ish phone number, and when your clients/contacts call it, assign that “line” to ring any or all of your traditional phones.  Lately I have noticed a call quality decline during the day, however, it’s assumed that this is just from the changeover.

I was reading Web Worker Daily and found an article posted on the 13th about GrandCentral becoming Google Voice.  Read the full article here.

Om Malik has posted further details over at GigaOm, read his article here.  He details converting from GrandCentral to Google voice, which I haven’t been able to do at the time of this article.

Features added are:

1. You can use your GrandCentral number to send and receive SMS messages, and have them forwarded to your current wireless phone. You can send messages from the mobile or from the landline phone.
2. Make phone calls using the web or your mobile/landline phone.
3. You can get transcripts for voicemails left on Google Voice. These transcripts, based on internal Google technology currently being used by GOOG-411 service, can be sent to you via SMS.
4. Create conference calls by dragging phone numbers onto existing calls. This will be useful for small businesses and web workers.
5. Free calls to all US numbers. You can make international calls but that will cost you, depending on the country you are dialing.

You can read the GoogleVoice blog here.

A question that I have is if I will still be able to use Gizmo as a SIP phone with the new service.  With it, I’m able to make calls from my GrandCentral number as long as I have some form of broadband.  This would make the service infinitely  less useful to many of us.

Integration with Google contacts means that my Blackberry will update to Google Voice too, very sweet.  All in all I’m very excited again.  Congratulations Vincent and Craig, glad you didn’t take the long nap of a dead service!