Googlified

Blogger Buzz today announced that bloggers* can now sign up for GrandCentral - a web-based voice communications platform Google acquired last year - without going through all the hassles of requesting for an invitation. To directly sign up for this service (still in beta), just go to this Blogger Invite page on GrandCentral and register your number.

The service is currently for U.S. users only, or at least, you will need a U.S. phone number to activate it.

GrandCentral is like super awesome because my friends can call me & leave me messages without my phone ringing. Hearing phones ring make my head asplodes.

* I think that anyone can register, not just bloggers. However, they ARE targeting bloggers at this point.

Have you ever wonder what that big “Beta” seal in the GrandCentral mean? That means you can’t rely on them and print that phone number on your business card.

According to the GrandCentral Blog, one of their “smaller underlying carriers” decided to disconnect some phone numbers and try to port these numbers over to a “larger carrier partner”. Unfortunately, more than 400 of them could not be ported over.

Once they found out about this, they “provided a direct email link to help them with any issues or concerns they may have, let users choose alternative numbers more to their liking, and offered any other assistance that would help them.”

Thank goodness I still got my number. :D

It’s not all that hard to have your/someone else’s GrandCentral account locked. You will just need to enter the wrong password when signing in GrandCentral repeatedly (~10x) and the account shall be automatically locked. Once the account is locked, it will take the GC folks a couple of days/weeks to reinstate the account.

I supposed that GrandCentral uses this as a security feature to fight against password attack, but geez, please send me an re-activation link to my email when my account is locked instead of having me to contact your for support and wait a whole week for a human reply? That’s just a whole lot of trouble.

The worst part is that anyone can lock your account*. The only requirement is your GC username or your email address that’s associate with GC.

Anyways, don’t abuse this “feature”. :)

*I could be wrong though.

It’s been three days since I have access to my old GrandCentral account (it was locked), but every time I logged into my account, it would say:

Oops! Bear with us as we bring the site back up.

We’ll be back shortly.

Three days ain’t short, my friend.

UPDATE: Now they locked my account again. They are really ticking me off. Yeah, I should send them an email again…

As you might know, GrandCentral revert back to private beta after the acquisition and you will need a invitation in order to sign up for the service. Well, now I have 5 invitations on hand (thanks to Greg Sadetsky), and I would like to give them out to my readers.

There’s no such thing as free lunch, so you will need to answer of the following questions and send the answers to my personal email account in order to get the invitation, first come first serve. :)

1. My birthday (MM/DD/YYYY)
2. My current residence (city name)
3. Name one non-Google Firefox extension that I am using

Note that the service is currently U.S. only, even if you get the invitation you will still need a U.S. phone number to activate the service. (they call you)

Well, time to show off your mad Google search skillz. :)

*Garett might have one or two left if you are lucky. :)-

UPDATE: Competition is over now. Thank you to everyone who participated. :)

Google today officially announced that they have acquired GrandCentral, an online phone management service, as previously rumored.

Just before the official announcement goes alive, GrandCentral switched back to private beta and only “a limited number of users will be able to sign up for an invitation to participate in continued beta-testing of the service” until Google says “We are ready!”

As usual, Google has a FAQ page for those who are interested in the deal, so here you go.

If you are currently a user of GrandCentral but doesn’t want to have your data transferred to Google (due to privacy concern), you can discontinue your service by sending an email to support@grandcentral.com before August 1, 2007 (one month away) and they will contact you at your registered email address.

I was trying to log into my account but it says, “This account is locked. Too many failed login attempts were made. Please contact support for assistance.” That says, I am just another human being.

TechCrunch reports that Google has acquired GrandCentral, an online phone management service with a lot of cool features.

• Check your messages by phone, email, or online
• Keep all your messages online for eternity
• Quickly (and secretly) block an annoying caller
• Surprise your callers with a custom voicemail greeting
• Turn your MP3s into the ring tones your callers hear

The GrandCentral Blog says that they have redesigned their home page on June 23rd, so I do believe that there’s something going on. Plus, TechCrunch is pretty reliable on these matters. :)