August 20, 2009

FAIL: Google makes GrandCentral useless

I've been using GrandCentral for little over 2 years now, a nice little forwarding service which allowed my parents and other US friends to call me for free in Canada. I had signed up for a Nevada number since my parents lived there at the time.

I remember showing off to friends that I had GrandCentral, whose access was strictly by invitation only, and invitations were extremely rare.

Google bought out GrandCentral and told that we'd have to migrate over to Google Voice. At first, things were great, I added my in-law's phone number, and after I got married I moved into my wife's condo and I was able to add that number too. Now my parents would be able to call me, my brother, or my in-laws.

My wife and I moved a couple of months ago, so I wanted to set up the new home phone number on my account so that friends could still reach me from the US. So I logged into "Google Voice". I went into settings, and tried to add my new number.

I got an error: "International numbers are not supported as forwarding phones."

Well, that can't be right because my account still shows the 3 other international numbers that are still being forwarded properly. So I tried updating one of the existing numbers -- the one from the place we had just moved out of. Same error.

FAIL.