GrandCentral’s acquisition by Google last week has caused a flurry of buzz and interest in the program. GrandCentral is no spring chicken (in relative terms… it first appeared on TechCrunch last September).  The founders of GrandCentral have a track record of selling out communication services as well (from the TechCrunch link above):

GrandCentral was founded by Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, both previously executives at Dialpad Communications, a VOIP service acquired by Yahoo! last year.

However, it took the Google acquisition to cause the recent surge of interest in GrandCentral, despite how good of a platform it might have already been.

When I signed up for the service in late February and started using it in March, I had a tough time convincing people that it was something worthwhile for web workers and people who favored email and web applications to voicemail. Funny how things change when the Big G gets involved.

Now that GrandCentral is a Google property, the service has moved to invite only, and there is a scurrying for invites that reminds me of the first few weeks of GMail’s appearance. Google certainly knows how to create the buzz and sustain that into a product launch.

From the email that went out to current GrandCentral subscribers yesterday:

Our priority now is to ensure that you, 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. In addition, 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 using the service and send us feedback about anything we can do to improve it.

Take their acqusition of Writely, for another example. I was teaching full time when that service was acquired by Google and before the acquisition, I couldn’t beg my students to join the service. When Writely went into invite-only mode on its way to becoming Google Docs, everyone wanted to be a part of the platform.

However, the key to creating this type of buzz doesn’t rely solely on Google’s deep pockets and countless PhD’s (though that doesn’t hurt). Take the recent launch of Pownce, for example. There are still calls for invites and the service is still hot since it is in “invite only” status.

Whether you’re launching a full on web2.0 app or an affiliate site to drive leads or sales, you should be paying attention to this sort of buzz generation and watch how the masters at Google do it… the basic principles are applicable across the board.

It looks like the GrandCentral move to Google’s servers will begin on or around August 1st from that same email that went out to GrandCentral users:

If you’d rather not maintain your account as a result of the acquisition, no problem: you can choose to discontinue your account any time before August 1, 2007 and your account won’t be transferred over to Google - we’ll delete your account and all related information.