GrandCentral is an offering from the original creators of DialPad, which gives you one phone number for all your telecommunications.
According to GrandCentral’s site, with a GrandCentral account you get:
- One Number…for LifeTM - Pick a number that will not change when you move or change jobs.
- ListenInTM on Voicemail - ListenIn on your messages from any phone before answering.
- Screen Your Calls - Know who is calling every time, even for blocked numbers.
- RingShareTM - Upload your MP3s to play for your callers instead of the standard ring.
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Block Callers - Block telemarketers or annoying callers and never get bothered again.
- Switch phones mid-call - Switch from cell to office or home your callers won’t know.
- Customize by Caller - Pick phones to ring, greetings to play and music to hear based on who is calling.
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Voicemail Everywhere - Get your voicemail online, through the phone or in your email.
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Voicemail Storage - All of your voicemail messages will be saved online, for LIFE.
This all sounds great and it seems to be getting very good reviews but with the recent telephony problems I have had I have a couple of questions:
- If anyone reading this post uses GrandCentral - is it good/reliable? and
- When will it be available in Ireland?
I have written previously about Microsoft’s Hotmail and what a lame excuse for a mail platform it is - in response to that Microsoft gave an account on their new mail platform, Microsoft Live Mail and I have to say it is a serious disappointment.
One of the biggest problems with Hotmail to date has been the fact that they delete all your mail if you don’t log in for 30 days. This has caused loads of people (myself included) lots of pain as we see several years mail disappear never to be returned.
With Windows Live Mail, that 30 day login has been changed to 120 days in an effort to overcome this problem. However, the proper way to fix this would have been to allow POP access to the mail. Live Mail’s main competitors (Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) both allow this functionality. POP access means you can access the email through an email application such as Outlook or Thunderbird and as these applications poll the servers every 30 minutes or so, it means as long as they are running on your system, you are logging into the servers and will never fall foul of the 30-day limit.
Another reason to allow POP access to email is so that you can read your mail when you are not connected to the ‘Net.
Furthermore, I was made aware of another deficiency of Live Mail this weekend at BarCamp Ireland where one of the speakers bemoaned the fact that you cannot export your contacts in Live Mail! As far as I recall this was possible in Hotmail.
It seems incredible to me that Live Mail would try to lock you into a crummy application by not allowing you to export your contacts. Then again, lock-in is Microsoft’s middle name, isn’t it?
I have been having serious mail problems the last couple of days.
If you sent me a mail and I haven’t responded, there is a chance I didn’t receive your email. Please presume I didn’t receive your email and re-send it.
Or phone/skype me!
Robert Scoble (of Microsoft) wrote a post the other day claiming that “Windows Live Mail (formerly Hotmail) has a philosophy?“. I’m sure they do but the philosophy they have is far different from the philosophy Scoble claims. He says:
The Windows Live Mail team just got a philosophy. Companies that have pro-participant philosophies, especially in the advertising age, will end up with bigger audiences and more profit in the end.
Pro-participant? Really? Then why is the Windows Live Mail interface crap on anything other than Internet Explorer?
This strikes me as a completely exclusionary philosophy - an anti-participant one if you will. You can use our mail application (to make us money by serving you ads) only on the (completely insecure) browser we make.
I see Mike Arrington had a similar issue with Windows Live Shopping. As Mike said:
Most bloggers and journalists use a Mac and/or Firefox and this audience was just completely alienated from Live Shopping.
Same goes for Windows Live Mail guys - c’mon, get a clue. This is 2006, not 1996. If you are releasing sites these days, they have to run on more than Internet Explorer. That war is over guys, and you lost.
I wrote a post a couple of weeks back about Hotmail deleting all my mails and it generated quite a bit of discussion (40 comments to-date).
One of the comments was from Omar Shahine - Omar is a program manager on the Hotmail team. I appreciated his dropping by and commenting.
Then over the weekend, Omar posted about the issue on his own blog - he said:
we have changed the policy for Windows Live Mail accounts to 120 day expiration… I just sent Tom a Windows Live Mail Invite to fix his storage issue and hopefully the expiration issue if he still cares to use the service.
All fair enough so far - execpt for the fact that I haven’t received any Windows Live Mail invite from Omar!
Then when I left a comment to that effect on his blog to that effect, the comment never appeared. Several comments left after mine have appeared so this looks a little bit dubious to me! What does anyone else think?
UPDATE: - Omar came back to me and explained that he had sent the invite to my Hotmail account! I haven’t logged into that account since all my mail was deleted - (why would I?) so I didn’t see it. He didn’t, however, explain the disappearance of the comment I left on his blog.
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