There are many cases where I want to hide my phone number from people – to keep telemarketers from calling me, to manage a business relationship, or to keep annoying calls at bay.  Gone are the days when you could just have your number unlisted… it’s almost impossible to do any sort of business online without the need to supply your phone number!

That’s where a phone routing system comes in handy.  It allows you to “hide” behind a virtual number – one that isn’t actually tied to a physical phone – and gives you the flexibility to route than number in any way you see fit.  Want to receive calls from your mom, but not that cheapskate relative that’s always borrowing money from you?  What about letting the folks at your garage call you about your car, but not letting the telemarketer wanting to sell you a gas guzzler through?  How about ringing your cell phone during the day, and your home phone in the evening.  Or maybe letting your mother call up and ring both your cell phone, and your wife’s cell phone when she does?  All of this is possible in a phone routing system.

There are several phone routing systems available to you.  They range from the complex, but free Asterisk pBX solution, to several paid routing services, to the (currently) free GrandCentral.com (now owned by Google).  In this blog entry, I’ll talk about GrandCentral.

First, GrandCentral.com was recently purchased by Google, and is currently in Beta.  At one time, GC users could send invitations out to their friends, but GC recently removed that functionality.  There’s no word as to when that will return, if ever.  For now, there is a waiting list at GrandCentral for you to sign up on.  I recommend you do that right away.

Once you’ve been accepted at GC, it’s time to setup your phones.  Just enter your phones, one at a time, into the simply UI.  Identify the type of each phone (cell, home, work, even Gizmo)!

Once you’ve setup your phones, it’s time to setup your contacts and sort them into groups. GC can import your contacts from Gmail (of course), and from an export file in CSV format.  You can also enter them manually, and GC will also add the info from your GC calls into your address book.  Simply select each contact, and indicate whether they are friends, family, work, or others.

Now open up your settings, and under each phone, indicate whether it can be reached by each of the contact groups.   If you don’t select a group, that contact’s call will go directly to voicemail.  You can also open a contact’s record, and specify what phone numbers that contact can reach – this overrides the group’s list.  So for example, if you family can only reach your home phone number, but you want your mom to be able to reach your cell phone too… just go into your mom’s contact record and select your cell phone!  Pretty slick, huh?

You can also do some other cool things – like recording a special greeting for a group, or for an individual contact.  I’ve done this before when I’ve received a lot of voicemails from somebody who had the wrong number.  I just recorded a “I’m sorry – you’ve got the wrong number.  Please stop calling this phone” message, attached it to the contact’s account, and waited.  The next time that person called, she heard the message, and the voicemails stopped!  How’s that for a cool feature? 

But the coolest feature I’ve found?  The DISCONNECTED PHONE feature.  Any time I get a telemarketer’s call, I just open the call record, and select “Show this number as disconnected”.  The next time that person calls (and they will try again), they get a “This number has been disconnected” message, and their autodialer AUTOMATICALLY updates their list (or the telemarketer does it manually).  Voila!  No more calls from that company – now THAT’s amazing.

Finally – give this new number out to EVERYBODY as your phone number.  Tell them to forget about the other numbers (if they ever knew them), and just call you here.  You can always be reached from this number.  And of course, feel free to give this number out to total strangers – knowing that you can block their calls at any time, while ensuring that people you WANT to talk to can always reach you!