It’s Time for Gmail and GrandCentral to Hook-up

Google has recently been busy making some impressive updates to Gmail, its three year old web-based email app. Last week it added support for the IMAP protocol for easy mailbox syncing across multiple machines and now they’re overhauling the Gmail backend to increase performance and allow for easier changes in the future. These are all awesome additions to my favorite way to manage email, but I’d like to see it become my communications command center once and for all by integrating GrandCentral.

I’ve mentioned my affection for GrandCentral a couple of times already. Although they were bought up by Google back in July, there hasn’t been any visible signs of “Googlization” yet – the application looks and behaves in much the same way as it did before the buyout. I can only hope that some sort of grand unification between Gmail and GrandCentral is being planned for the future. I’ve already got one inbox that I look to for most of my communications, so it really only makes sense to have my GrandCentral messages show up there too. And, I’ve already got a great big address book of contacts in Gmail that would be perfect for click-to-call and a running history of every email, IM, and call we’ve exchanged.

I’m hoping we see something come of the GrandCentral acquisition soon, because it’s just too cool of a service to be sitting in limbo for much longer.