Web Worker Daily

With all the hoopla about Google Wave, another set of invitations coming out of Google seems to have been overlooked. After months of waiting, certain Twitterers are reporting that they’ve finally received invites to Google Voice, which I wrote about back in June. I’ve had GV myself since it was GrandCentral, but I got another invitation last night. The folks selling Voice invites on eBay may lose their customers soon! If you haven’t received an invite yet, you can request one here.

The concept behind Google Voice is simple: You’re given one phone number that can be configured to ring in multiple places — office, home, on your cell phone or even on an account on the VoIP service Gizmo5. We’ve looked at a number of virtual phone systems, including 3jam and Grasshopper, and while they have many nice features, it’s hard to beat Google Voice’s price — free except for international calls.

Have you received your Google Voice invitation?

I’ve been using Google Voice since it was GrandCentral, and have been quite impressed. But it’s still in beta, and while invitations to the beta are finally becoming available, I understand that they’re still hard to come by.

3jam is billing itself as an alternative to Google Voice, and it’s available today, so I’ve given it a quick spin. This is not a complete review, as there are some of 3jam’s features that I haven’t tried, such as SMS messaging, forwarding to Skype, an API that lets you write your own applications to interact with their service, and “group” numbers that allow multiple users to share voice mail and messaging. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Voice wants to be your phone manager, SMS and voicemail provider. The service is rumored to be almost ready for public access.

Google Voice germinated after Google acquired GrandCentral almost two years ago. The service was relaunched earlier this year as a private beta for GrandCentral users. I’ve been using it for a while, and am generally impressed. Google Voice offers a number of features that should make it popular with web workers. Read the rest of this entry »

In a comment on a post here on WWD, David Pogue told us that change was coming soon to GrandCentral, and of course he was right. GrandCentral is FINALLY relaunching as Google Voice.

Om has details about the back-from-the-sleeping service over on GigaOM.

In addition to opening the service up to new users, Om reports that Google Voice will host a suite of new VoIP features:

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 U.S. numbers. You can make international calls but that will cost you, depending on the country you are dialing.

Google Voice will also integrate with Google contacts, which will be a very welcome change.

None of these new features are groundbreaking. There are a number of startups that can do what Google Voice does and more. But with Google Voice we can likely expect a simple, straightforward interface and low barrier to entry, with only a Google Account required to sign up.

We’ll have a more in-depth look at Google Voice once it’s widely available.

We’ve been worried about GrandCentral for a while now. The free service that promised “one number for life” started with such promise. And then Google bought the company and the technology way back in July 2007…and they left it to rot. No new invites. Existing users have seen the service languish in maintenance mode since the acquisition. No updates. No new features or improvements. No word from the developers. Shame.

This morning, those of us still using a GrandCentral number are logging in to our accounts to see this:

An expired SSL certificate is not a big deal. Just accept the expired certificate because you trust the site and move on. But that’s not the point. It’s yet more evidence that if the GrandCentral folks are still at Google, they’re working on something else. The GrandCentral support forum is filled with questions and problems, and there has been no official answer to anything.

The challenge for those of us left behind is number portability, or lack thereof. I like my GrandCentral number. It’s easy to remember. It’s in the area code I want it to be. I would gladly use another reasonably-priced service if I could take the number with me (I do use PhoneFusion for my local contacts). Yes, GrandCentral has always been “beta” and was never meant to be used for mission-critical contacts. But it’s a little difficult to “test” a service like GrandCentral without giving the number out to contacts, isn’t it?

It’s about time for Google to do the right thing. Shut GrandCentral down once and for all, and give us a way to port our numbers elsewhere.

For mobile workers, it’s hard to beat the freedom and flexibility Internet telephony provides us.  One of our favorite web services, GrandCentral, gives you the ability to have one phone number that can ring an assortment of phones including your mobile, landline, office phone, and any other place you’d like to be reached.

Additionally, there are those who embrace the utility of a soft phone.  A soft phone is an application that runs on your computer and allows you to send or receive phone calls, normally through a microphone headset.  Skype is probably the most well known soft phone, but a competitor of theirs called Gizmo5 (formerly known as Gizmo Project) can be combined with GrandCentral to give you soft phone capabilities.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend, the blogosphere was abuzz with news about GrandCentral, a service we’ve covered before, experienced an outage.  For a few hours on Sunday morning, calls to GrandCentral were not getting relayed to their users and GrandCentral’s website was down as well.

This event should encourage all those of us who work on the web to build redundancy into your web-centric work life.  It’s no secret that our internet and web infrastructures are vulnerable to many threats whether they be man-made or occurrences of nature.  Taking simple measures can help ensure you stay productive and in contact should some part of your work infrastructure go down.

For enterprises, allowing people to work from alternate locations (including home) is conducive to disaster recovery.  In the case of this GrandCentral outage, users of this service should simply give all important contacts an alternate number to reach them in case of GrandCentral being unavailable.
Read the rest of this entry »