Why Does Every New Service Want To Be GrandCentral Reincarnated?

I find it amazing how many "new" services either come to me for representation or I read about who choose to position themselves as "another take on GrandCentral/GoogleVoice." Talk about being super "me too." Take the About.com recap about PhoneBooth, a new service from Bandwidth.com. The about.com piece screams of messaging and positioning that's all GoogleVoice this and GoogleVoice that, even going so far as to be labeled "an alternative" in the story. And in fairness to Nadeem, he didn't jump to that conclusion. The PhoneBooth brand story, positioning and messaging led him there.

So what if PhoneBooth offers GV like Find Me, Follow Me as well as second number that can terminate anywhere. So does Line2 and Line2 offers more with the ability to present your "other" number, just like the failed, TalkPlus which may have had the best idea ever for mobile phones.

The real offer from PhoneBooth, from what I see, lies in their PhoneBooth On Demand service offering which is where for $20.00 a month some advance features come into play.

Bandwidth.com is clearly building out application based services to put more minutes on their network and for them, services like PhoneBooth and FreePbx are strides in the right direction.