Blog About Photography

This has noth­ing to do with art, but, man, the inter­net is get­ting so good. I just read this Times arti­cle about Grand­Cen­tral, and imme­di­ately signed up for it. What it does it pretty rad. It lets you sign up for a phone num­ber (you can pick your area code — I picked 917 — and then it let’s you choose from like 30 num­bers) that, when called, will ring all of your other num­bers at once (work, cell, home, etc.) It’s in beta test­ing right now so it’s free. After beta is over, it’s free for two num­bers. A pre­muim plan is a lit­tle pricey for the casual user — $15 per month.

I only have one phone num­ber, but I signed up any­way because of the other use­ful bit of fun­tion­al­ity this ser­vice pro­vides. Pretty soon I’m going to be mov­ing from DC to New York, and I sup­pose I could change my phone num­ber and it wouldn’t be that big a deal. But it would obvi­ously be a pain and I still get oppor­tu­ni­ties from time to time that would stop com­ing if I were to change my phone num­ber. Grand­Cen­tral let’s me link my cur­rent num­ber to a 917 num­ber. Prob­lem solved.

The other cool thing is that when peo­ple leave you voice­mail when they’ve called you using the Grand­Cen­tral num­ber, you can man­age all the mes­sages from an email-​​style inbox on the Grand­Cen­tral web­site. I have a real prob­lem check­ing my mes­sages because I get really fuck­ing bored going through them one by one. This kind of func­tion­al­ity is long over­due and it’ll be good for those of us who can’t afford an iPhone.

Posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 2:49 pm