So Google bought Grand Central. A long time ago in fact. Cool.
Why, then, have they yet to do anything cool with it?
They seem to be missing everything, like contact book synchronization, spam filter usage, google account integration...but by far the greatest miss yet by google is something that the world would be screaming to have: voicemail in your email inbox.
Think about it. Google + GrandCentral = Voicemail in your Gmail box. How awesome would that be? Simply go to gmail, and, if someone sends you a phone message, you click it, the line then triples in size to reveal a player control, and plays your message. If you are viewing the thing with Gmail mobile, a different thing happens. Voicemail messages are not necessarily included in the POP/IMAP feeds, but if they are, they are included as a regular old email message with the phone number without an email address set as the sender, and basically have a standard template of text with the mp3/ogg vorbis (one can dream) file set as an attachment, and maybe an ActiveX/Flash/embed player set in the page so that intelligent email clients could play it. Apple could make an updated firmware that would allow it to integrate with the phone on the iPhone (Apple will actually listen to Google I suspect - at least they will if they are smart).
So how has Google missed this? These guys are smart? With all the crazy buzz that Apple's visual voicemail has gotten I cannot imagine that they have failed to see this! This would beat visual voicemail by a mile. This MUST be the only reason they haven't - because of Apple. Maybe they have some deal which precludes doing this.
Google - if you are reading this - I'd really love to know why this hasn't been done...and believe me, if it isn't good, there will be another post on this blog which declares you all idiots. 'We didn't think about it' is not a good reason...'we didn't think about it but we are going to do it as a top priority' is a bit better.
