For those of you who may not follow Craig and Vincent's work over at GrandCentral as closely as I do, here's the confirmation I've been watching for -

We’re now part of Google!

We
wanted to let you know that GrandCentral has been acquired by Google!
We’re particularly excited about this because it ensures that not only
will we have the resources to continue to bring you even more
innovative communications features down the road, but that we will be
able to continue to offer you the service, with many features for free,
for a long time to come.

We started GrandCentral because we wanted to create a service that
puts users in control of their voice communications and not the other
way around. As you have discovered, with GrandCentral you get all of
your phone calls through just one number that never changes and you can
link and ring up to six phones to ring when somebody calls you. But
that’s just the start. You can set different rules for each caller
(some ring all your phones, other can go straight to voicemail), create
personal voicemail greetings for each of your callers, and even check
your voicemail on the web with all of your messages in just one inbox.
We’ll even save your messages for as long as you want.

Have you ever tried to save a message on your cell phone but it gets
deleted after a few weeks? Or have you wished you could hear your
voicemail messages while they are being left like you used to be able
to do on your old home answering machine? Have you ever been on a call
on your cell but wished you could switch it to your desk or home phone?
How about having a filter to weed out unwanted telemarketer calls
automatically? With GrandCentral you are in control and do all of
this…and this is just the beginning. As part of Google we’ll be able to
create even more unique features to let you control your calls the way
you want.

Many of you probably have questions about what happens to the service now that we’re a part of Google. We’ve created a FAQ–which will answer most of your questions, but a couple of highlights:

Our priority now is to ensure that our current beta users continue
to have a great user experience. While we scale the service, we are
moving to an invitation-only model for new users. If you’re a
registered user today, you can invite five of your friends to join. If
you’re a new user–don’t worry–you can Reserve Your Number
today, and we’ll let you know when it’s available. We plan to issue
lots of invites as quickly as possible, subject to capacity, to those
that have reserved their number, so do sign up quickly.

If you’re a user today–here’s the good news: GrandCentral will
continue to remain entirely free as we work with Google to add
capacity, work out any kinks, fix bugs, and add a ton more great
features. We hope you continue to using the service and send us
feedback about anything we can do to improve it.

Thanks for your support so far. We’ll always work to earn it.

Craig Walker & Vincent Paquet

And my comment there as well -

Ken Camp Says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.

July 2nd, 2007 at 12:32 pm

Craig and Vincent,

While I confess to having a mixed reaction to this news, that
reaction is based on Google’s historic performance with acquisitions.
Blogger is a good example. But from a GrandCentral perspective, this is
indeed fabulous news and huge congratulations to you both. You guys
have put in countless hours and tons of effort into bring a concept
into reality then evangelizing it to the masses. Congrats on huge
success.