UPDATE:  I just realized that I have some invites for people to get into the beta for this, if you're interested leave a comment or email me.  All invites are now gone, sorry.

Do you think that in five years you will still have a home number, a work number, a cell number, and multiple email addresses?  I don’t, I haven’t for a while.  I’m a pretty firm believer that in a couple of years we’ll only have one ID which will work converge all incoming and outgoing communications channels.  I think that eventually it’ll take the form of a URI (e.g. jasonkolb@atmy.name), but for now I’m pretty pleased to have narrowed down all my phone numbers to one number.  As of yesterday, I only have one phone number, at least until I get to use my URI.  I have seen the future of personal communication, and Google GrandCentral is on the right track.

I got my beta invite for Google GrandCentral the other day, configured everything, and I am floored.  THIS is the personal communication service that I’ve been waiting for.  It takes the best features of a Blackberry, an iPhone, and a softphone, and combines them in a Web service.  The only thing it’s lacking is mobile device integration, although if you have a mobile device capable of playing MP3’s it does that as well (albeit over a Web site—better get an iPhone for that).

I hadn’t heard of GrandCentral until recently, when I stumbled across it on one of the Google blogs.  It’s a free service (purchased from a startup by Google) that uses VOIP to converge all of your phone numbers (and, email, if you want—but I’ll stick to my own domain name thanks) together into one point of contact (an endpoint mashup?), and spreads a tasty layer of VOIP functionality on top.  As you switch mobile service providers, jobs, and home numbers, you just need to update GrandCentral and it will automatically redirect your one, permanent GrandCentral phone number to the new number.  It’s all transparent to your callers, they don’t need to know about or care which phone you’re picking up--you can change numbers to your heart's content.  And you have the option of ringing all your phones at once if you like, and picking up whichever phone is most convenient.  I have mine set up to ring my mobile all the time, my Gizmo soft phone when I’m online, and the house phone if it’s a friend or family.

I remember when I was working at my first call center, and I figured out how to program the old phone switch to reroute calls going to my desk phone to ring my cell phone.  I thought that was just the coolest thing, mostly because I could be away from my desk without anyone knowing.  Everyone thought I worked insane hours, I’d always answer my phone at 10PM   Well, this is far cooler than that.  GrandCentral appears to be a graphical user interface on top of a subset of their call routing engine.  If you’ve never worked with phone switches before, most of the functionality will be completely new to you.  If you have, you’ll be jealous of the user interface.

GrandCentral consists of an inbox, where you can see your voicemails (remember that nifty “visual voicemail” feature the iPhone has?  This has it too.), an address book (where you set up your contacts), and some settings (where the magic is), that’s it.  If you’re not familiar with that iPhone visual voicemail feature, it shows you your voicemails in an email-like list and lets you choose which one you want to listen to.

The contact list is where you start to see some of the real richness of this system.  I was able import all my contacts from Outlook, which gave me a fully populated contact list.  What’s really cool is what you can start doing once you have that populated contact list.

You can very easily set up some basic call routing against your contact list, such as sending certain contacts directly to voicemail, routing some to your cell phone and others only to your desk phone, set up custom voicemail greetings for certain contacts, send some contacts directly to voicemail, and even block certain contacts from calling you completely.  You can also set up groups of contacts and administer them as groups.  GrandCentral even keeps a history for each contact, so you can see when they called you and from which number.

Using the GrandCentral settings you can tweak the way calls are handled even further.  You can do things like screen out callers who don’t have a number, or aren’t in your contact list.  You have the option of being notified of new voice mails via Email or SMS.  You can even have it screen out spam phone calls (telemarketing calls), choosing whether to send them directly to voicemail or blocking them with a "Number out of service" message.

GrandCentral also lets you record calls, switch phones mid-conversation, even answer the phone while someone’s leaving you a voicemail.  And, for people with an online presence, it gives you a nifty little widget (check out the right side of my blog to see mine), which lets people enter their name and number, and GrandCentral will call them, call your phone without showing them your number, and connect you.  Kind of like an electronic secretary that never sleeps.

Needless to say, I love this service.  Now, I only have to give out a new phone number one more time in my entire life.  At least until I can start using my URI, that is :)  Google just earned some love from me, buying this company was a smart move.