#FF00AA

You’d think that free (as in beer) web-2.0-era services would refrain from using the lame marketing techniques of the previous century (Dell just announced they’d ditch their rebate system, didn’t they?), but you might be wrong.

Gizmo Project, the wannabe Skype killer, launches a great promotion, its home page announcing: “Free Calls to 60 Countries - over 2 Billion Phones!” You might take that to mean you’d get free VoIP calls from your Gizmo account to any of the 2 billion landlines in 60 countries. Because, well, that does seem to be what it says. And pretty much all tech blogs have announced it that way (because their editors are paid to release, not verify or analyze, the news).

I was surprised, but didn’t originally check for myself, because I couldn’t care less about VoIP (or telephone at all), and because it’s too hot in here, until I found out on TechCrunch (who also got it wrong the first time, and was corrected by a reader) that there’s an asterisk on the details page. You have to scroll way, way down and read the very fine print to find out that it’s only free when you’re calling a landline number registered to an active Gizmo user — that is, as a Gizmo user, you say your landline number is such-and-such, and then you can get calls for free on this number. Which… uh, if that’s your regular, registered number, changes are your internet connection, computer, Gizmo and headset are right next to it and you might as well use them to answer incoming calls.

So you don’t get free calls to 2 billion landlines, but to a few thousand “active” Gizmo users — i.e., people who use Gizmo regularly enough to earn the right to get free incoming landline calls. Oh, and, while they’re at it, they reserve the right to limit call length, too.

Yeah. In short: bullshit. Loads of bullshit. I say, vote with your wallet (since VoIP is free anyway, it won’t matter much to you), and stick to Skype. Which I have no vested interest in since, as explained before, I couldn’t care less about Skype, Gizmo or whatever. It only pisses me off to see that kind of marketing crap — even more so when it’s validated out of sheer laziness by most blogs.