Creeva’s World 2.0

I’ve drank then kool-aid and I can say I am a Google fan boy, for the most part. Though the com­pany has the motto “Do No Evil” — motto’s change over time and the power of the infor­ma­tion they hold is prob­a­bly some of the most valu­able in the world. Temp­ta­tion begets evil. This post how­ever is not about the evils can do, it is about one of their newest acqui­si­tions — grand­cen­tral.

For those that don’t know what grand­cen­tral is — the rough answer is that it’s a ser­vice that gives you a vir­tual phone num­ber and that phone num­ber will ring mul­ti­ple phones to hunt you down. Now there are a lot of cool uses for this ser­vice so don’t get me wrong about my com­plaints, they are just really big annoy­ances that let’s me give this ser­vice a 7 out of 10.

1. You can not make your own groups with their own rules. You have to fit every­thing into the pre­de­fined groups — which include friends, fam­ily, work, web but­ton, and other. The need to cre­ate your own groups is a must that is cur­rently missing.

2. I can’t play the web mes­sages on my palm TX — ok that’s Palm’s fault not Google’s, but I wanted three things.

3. If you are in a house­hold where there are more then a sin­gle user of grand­cen­tral you have to fight who get’s the home phone num­ber. When hus­band, wives, chil­dren, room mates lives together and they both use grand­cen­tral only one of them can use the home phone num­ber in their pro­file. This is the largest com­plaint I have since adopters are likely to be fam­i­lies and almost all of them would want their home phones to ring — but the first per­son to lay claim get’s the num­ber. I under­stand the need to lim­it­ing the amount of num­ber recy­cling — but to get around this I would say pick a num­ber of times a num­ber can be re-used (2–4) it must be des­ig­nated as a home num­ber (though think­ing about shared work num­bers is a whole new ball game) and finally have a mutual authen­ti­ca­tion with the user who first reg­is­tered and ver­i­fied that num­ber to make sure that this is indeed some­one who should have access to that number.

If num­ber 3. where solved this would take grand­cen­tral to a 9/10 ser­vice — add all the issues it would get an 11/10 — curse you palm.