Since I had signed up for a Grand Central account before the company was acquired by Google, I’ve been grandfathered into the beta for the new Google Voice service based on Grand Central.\u00a0 It’s supposed to provide a unified phone number in the cloud whose behavior you can control.<\/p>\n
You set the number to ring at your desk during the day, on your mobile phone while you’re commuting and at your home phone in the evening.\u00a0 You can set it so only certain incoming calls go through; only family can reach you after 9pm, say.\u00a0 The idea is to separate the phone number from the device, which takes power away from the phone company and gives it to Google.\u00a0 I don’t like my phone company much so this is fine with me, but you do have to worry about how much personal information, now phone calls, are flowing through Google.<\/p>\n
Ten years ago I had a ‘follow-me’ number that functioned more or less like this new Google Voice service.\u00a0 It makes sense; you shouldn’t have to know the IP address of the computer you’re sending email to, which is essentially what you’re doing when you’re calling someone on their phone number (the POTS version of the phone’s IP address.)<\/p>\n
What I learned is that people so strongly associate the phone number with the device that, at least back then, it was a waste to try to disassociate them.\u00a0 People would capture my cell phone number when I called them and use that rather than what I thought was the simpler way of just using my follow-me number.\u00a0 So I’m going to be pretty leery of that feature of Google Voice for the near future.<\/p>\n
But there’s one fantastic feature which I just discovered and absolutely love.\u00a0 The service integrates with Gmail’s contact list, which unfortunately is kinda crummy, and lets you dial phone numbers on your contact list.\u00a0 It then asks you what number you want to use — your home phone, your mobile phone, the phone in the conference room you’re sitting in, whatever.\u00a0 And then it dials you, first.\u00a0 The phone rings, you answer.\u00a0 And then the phone on the other end starts to ring.\u00a0 It’s like telling Betty to put a call into Sam’s office: “I have Sam’s office on the line, sir!”\u00a0 If I had an assistant named Betty that is.<\/p>\n
I spend a lot of time in my home office communicating with colleagues via IM.\u00a0 Often, it’s just to check in to see if they’re available to talk on the phone.\u00a0 The conversation goes like this:<\/p>\n
\nEd: Hi, I just got off my last call<\/pre>\nHank: Hey<\/pre>\nEd: Do you still need to talk to me?<\/pre>\nHank: Yeah, do you ahve a minute?<\/pre>\nEd: Sure, what #?<\/pre>\nHank: (212) 867-5309<\/pre>\nEd: ring<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n(Ironically, as I’ve been writing this, the exact scenario has just played out on IM: I need to wrap this up to get to that call.)<\/p>\n
This isn’t the way CTI (computer-telephony integration) was supposed to play out, but perhaps we can integrate Google Voice into IM to simplify the process.\u00a0 What I’d ideally like to be able to do is to update the statusphere about my availability and then have a button on my IM for Hank.\u00a0 Then my phone and his phone would ring.\u00a0 If we needed to add more people, we could conference them in the same way — just have more phones ring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since I had signed up for a Grand Central account before the company was acquired by Google, I’ve been grandfathered into the beta for the new Google Voice service based on Grand Central.\u00a0 It’s supposed to provide a unified phone … Continue reading