Phones and phone calls are a pain in the ass. Seriously — if you want to get ahold of me, I’d rather you just send me an e-mail. But some things still require using the phone, so I can’t completely avoid it (yet). Anything that makes phone calls less annoying is a good thing in my book. If you agree (or if you use telephones a lot, or if you’re just into telecom/voip stuff), you may be interested in playing with GrandCentral.

Google acquired the company recently, so I’ve been trying out their service and it’s very cool. It does a lot of stuff, but the basic thing is that you have a single phone number that you manage from the GrandCentral website. You can control which of your phones ring when people call the GrandCentral number, including different rules for different groups of people. For example, you can have calls from friends and family ring all of your phones, while calls from your boss only ring your cell phone and calls from your crazy ex-girlfriend go straight to voicemail (or even get a “this number is no longer in service” message!). Extremely cool stuff.

GrandCentral is invite-only right now, but I have a couple of invites left. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll send one your way.

BTW, my GrandCentral number is 425-318-4375 (yes, I’m that confident in GrandCentral’s spam filtering), or you can call me with the button below. But don’t be surprised if it goes directly to voicemail ;-)