Start handing out your Grand Central number instead of your cell/home/office numbers and when dialed Grand Central will ring each of your numbers in order, waiting for you to answer at one of them. So if your buddy Bobby calls, it’ll prompt him for his name (only once – unless you tell it to prompt Bobby every time) and he’ll say something suave like “Dude, it’s like totally Bobby, man.” When you pick up whatever phone you’re closest to, you’ll hear an automated voice (with a nice fast tempo) saying “Call from ‘Dude, it’s like totally Bobby, man.’ – press one to accept, two to send to voicemail, three to listen in on the voicemail, or four to accept and record the call”. Of course you instantly press two because Bobby’s ridiculously dull when he’s not drunk.

Those last two options should foreshadow some of the cool features Grand Central offers. Here are the features that I find the most interesting or useful. Check out the full list here.

Real Time Listening In To Voicemail

This is huge. Being able to listen to a voicemail in real time and jump in is so incredibly useful, once you do it you’ll wonder how you lived without it, especially if you tend to get a lot of calls from people you don’t know (think “realtor”) or the same person calls you over and over and over and over (think “your mom”).

Call Recording

Being able to ad-hoc record a call simply by pressing “4″ during the call is pretty cool. As the example on Grand Central’s website states – ever need to write down an address, or some instructions? Forget the pen and paper, just press “4″ and let your significant other go on about whether you need to pick up milk or bread on the way home. You can listen to it later when it’s actually relevant. From the web or your phone.

Group-based Configuration

Add known numbers to groups (Family, Friends, etc.) and apply special options or routing to them. Send all “unknown” callers right to voicemail. Ring your cell, office, and home for Family, but only cell and home for Friends. Play different ringback sounds per group, etc.

Web Button

This is a little weird, but still cool. See the linked text “Web Button” in the screenshot above? You can choose to place a button on your site that allows people to call you without ever knowing your Grand Central number (or your private number, either). I added it to the blog, try it out – but please have something interesting ready to say. You always could’ve called me via Skype, but that would depend on whether my laptop was on with Skype running. Now, you can click the big blue “Call Me!” button (which, incidentally, was the smallest button they offer–the biggest is flippin’ huge), and you’ll be presented with a mini-form to enter your name and number.

Press “Call Me” and Grand Central calls your number, establishes a connection, then calls my number and connects us up. I know what your number is, but you have no idea what mine is. Roy Osherove wrote a post talking about including your phone number on your blog, like Scoble does, but it doesn’t appear he ever went ahead and posted his own. Maybe he was nervous about what could happen if he did post it, I don’t know–I probably would be. An anonymous way to contact me in person is pretty cool, even if I might have it go straight to voicemail. Do I? You’ll have to call to find out…

CallSwitch

Ever start a conversation on your cell phone, only to wish you could finish it on a speaker phone? Happens plenty to me. Sometimes I get a call while I’m on my way to the office, and when I actually get to my office my sore ear starts lusting after my Polycom 601 with comfortable handset and good quality speaker phone. With Grand Central, I just press “*” during the call, and wait a moment. I can keep talking, and eventually (relatively soon) it will ring my office phone, and conference it into the call. I can then hang up on my cell at my leisure. If I wanted to, I could tell the caller to hang on a sec, press “*”, hang up my cell, and wait for my office phone to ring before continuing the conversation, but I’m not usually that trusting. A good example Grand Central gives is a kid calling to ask Dad something. Dad doesn’t know, but knows Mom is at a phone further down the “chain”, so he says “Ask yer mom”, presses “*”, and hangs up. Mom gets the call a moment later. Or, your cell battery is about to die. Just forward it on to the next phone in the chain. Very cool, and very useful.

Other…

There are tons of other useful features – like both web and phone access to most things, an intuitive UI both on the web and on the phone, community-based spam blocking, voicemail playback and mapping (it seems to map out the location of the phone number), per-number configuration and control, screening options, and more. Just look at all the options for a voicemail in your inbox:

I think the thing that really gets me about Grand Central is how dang useful everything is. I look at its services and say “cool!”, and I’ll actually use it too. My previous semi-rant about “Web-2.0-social-networking-mashup-who-even-has-the-time sites” was mostly triggered by how utterly unuseful most of those sites are to me, or most people (if we really admitted it). But enough of that.

Right now Grand Central is invite-only, since it’s in beta. And the service is sketchy – I’ve not yet missed a call, but I haven’t been able to log into the web site so far today. You can get an invite to Grand Central from InviteShare or from me, I still have about 4 invites left. Shoot me an email at aaronlerch at gmail dot com. Or heck, try this thing out – call me using the new “Call Me” web button on my blog and ask me for an invite. I’d be happy to chat with you.

Grand Central’s features, while not groundbreaking or brand-spanking new (you can do all this and more with our software), are pretty freaking impressive and unique for a free consumer-focused service. And they nailed the user interface, both on the phone and on the web. We’ll see how they do in the future under the Google umbrella.

Update: Looks like I’m an entire year behind LifeHacker. Doh.

Technorati Tags: Grand Central, Telephony

The Importance of User Experience
Originally uploaded by soldierant.