I have gone back to using my old GrandCentral account recently. It is truly a great service, one of the first that treats VOIP as a consumer thing rather than simply an enterprise tool. GrandCentral gives me one phone number (in my case, a  San Francisco number) and it gives me a degree of control and ownership over that number that I can’t get anywhere else.

That level of personal control and ownership over my phone line and number is a new phenomenon, and I am starting to wonder what the true impact will be. The phone was originally a shared-service model, starting with party-lines and then the wide availability of direct household lines. A few shifts have already taken place so far that make using the phone a much more personal experience, and there are a few coming changes that are going to have an even bigger impact.

The first major change that has occurred is pretty obvious: Cellphone adoption continues to grow. My nieces and nephews all have them, and their mom and dad both have cellphones. It is is how the family keeps in touch and they are the devices that the kids use to manage their social lives. An average of 188 TXT messages per month are sent by each user in the United States. That number will probably triple or better in the coming 3 years as people shy away from using the phone as an interruptive voice communications tool and more towards asynchronous communications.

A lot of these interesting phone+social shifts have taken place in little pieces. Jaiku and Plazes are examples of services that attempted to couple tightly with the device to create a location and status aware experience. The iPhone has created a platform for dozens of similar applications to spring up on as well, but we still seem to be missing some part of the puzzle.

I asked some folks on twitter today (in the most unscientific way) if they are talking on the phone more or less today than they were 10 years ago. The response was an overwhelming “far less”. Mind you, asking a bunch of fellow Twitter addicts might not be the best sample, but I think it is indicative of a trend. The thing I am not sure about is exactly why we are moving away from voice, and if it is even an actual trend, or if we are just seeing the back end of a cycle.

Will Voice find its way in the social web?

The role of a voice conversation will probably have to change to find new growth markets. The very idea of why, and how, we use the phone will shift. Here are some ideas on what may happen.

The phone number: The phone number will not survive, at least not at its current level of importance. Contact Lists are becoming far more prevalent, and their usefulness is immediatly apparent. If you have ever used a Skype phone (hardware version of skype), you will know what I am talking about. When you pick up the handset you see your contact list right there. You know who is Available, who is around but Idle, and who has marked themselves as being away.

The real time conversation: I am not convinced that the phone, and voice in general, will exist only in a world of real time conversation. The snippet, or a less formal version of what we call Voicemail, could play a more significant role in a social future.

The Handset: Most people I know are now perfectly comfortable talking in to their computers to make a call. We are also increasingly using cellphone that feel and act more like computers than they do a traditional handset. As the tools and hardware get better, I think we will see the passing of the handset as the default tool for voice communication. In car communication tools, Bluetooth headsets that are self contained and new Netbooks will all be important factors.

Presence: We are updating our Facebook status, our Instant Messenger status, we are twittering. Why can’t all these activities inform our phone about what is important to us right now. Whether it is a a voicemail message that reads out my current Twitter status, or one that automatically deny’s certain callers based on what I am doing, there are all sorts of new possibilities that exist in creating mashups of new social tools and legacy systems.

A lot of people smarter than I have been thinking about voice communication for a long time, but I think it is time to start thinking about the changes in terms of sociality, not in terms of technology. VOIP has arrived and it no longer matters, what matters is finding ways to make voice communication more useful and relevant to an everyday life that is increasingly adopting text based communication.