I’ve been enamored of late with GrandCentral, the very cool web phone service recently acquired by Google (which makes it even more cool I guess).
GrandCentral isn’t a standard phone service provider — they require you to get your phone service from somewhere else. What GrandCentral excels at is providing a way to “front end” a number of different phones (home, business, cell) with a single number that you can choose. This lets you control how calls from different friends and family (or even perfect strangers) get routed between your phones.
For example, some contacts can get routed to your home phone, some to your cell — depending on who they are and how you set up where calls go. One of the options that is provided is to route calls to a soft phone from the Gizmo Project. In a nutshell, this lets you route calls from the PSTN — using a number in your area code, mind you — to the SIP phone running on your computer (either Linux or Windows, as Gizmo runs on both). How cool is that?
You can imagine my excitement when I learned that there is a GrandCentral plugin for facebook — it basically adds a “Call Me” button to your facebook profile.
While this is cool, I already have a voice application enabled in my facebook profile. So now I’ve got two of them…
Unfortunately, I’ve not received a single call yet. Not sure if it’s me, or if people just aren’t ready to use voice applications from within Facebook.
Maybe I need more friends.