Google Voice â€“ The return of GrandCentral

After many, many moons of silence, Google Voice has been rolled out as a "preview." The born-again GrandCentral service first will be available to existing GrandCentral users, with others being able to sign up "soon."

Google bought GrandCentral back in July 2007, where upon the hosted mobile UC solution fell into a black hole, with an "in beta" logo stuck on the site more than a year after being bought. A trickle of sporadic blog postings from GrandCentral's founders appeared after the purchase, with the last, dated April 22, 2008, promising "a ton of cool new features." In October 2008, the division was no longer taking subscribers, and Google was supplying cryptic answers as to its fate.

Among the features Google Voice adds to the baseline GrandCentral load are transcripts of one's voicemail, and archive and search of all SMS text messages you send and receive, plus easy access to Goog-400 directory assistance and (hmm, where have we heard this before?) the ability to make low-priced international calls. GrandCentral's core was a single-number ring to multiple numbers, centralized voice mailbox accessible to the web, and the smooth feature to screen calls by listening live as callers left voice mail.

After publishing our fall special report deeming GrandCentral as one of the "VoIP Fallen," we received information from a reliable source that The Goog had been stockpiling lots of phone numbers for an advanced telephony service. Apparently, GoogleVoice is that service.

Now speculation turns to how this announcement affects Skype and the phone companies, with an emphasis that calls over the Internet will gnaw away at revenues from other players in the space. And privacy advocates worry that consumers feeding yet more data into the Google trough could be a Bad Thing.

For more:
- Read Goog's terse blog [1] about Google Voice.