Gizmo Ties Up With LiveJournal

Gizmo and LiveJournal recently announced that they are teaming up together, pitching their new partnership as the first integration of VoIP with a social network. They’re calling it Gizmo Project for LJ Talk.

So what do you get? Well basically, you download Gizmo and then login using your LiveJournal username and password. Once you’ve been logged in you’ll be able to see a contact list populated by your LJ friends who you can call or IM.

It’s a free download for all LiveJournal members, but Gizmo is free anyway so there’s no real news there. You get the usual free calls between members and cheap calls to landlines. There are some nice new features such as the ‘Call Me’ and ‘IM’ buttons that you can place on your blog so people can get in touch easily, kind of like those Skype buttons you see everywhere. Any changes that you make to your LiveJournal profile will be automatically synced with Gizmo, which is handy.

If you are a paid up member of LiveJournal (Paid or Plus plan) you can easily post a podcast to your LiveJournal blog with a click of a button, which is going to be a handy feature.

All-in-all, this looks like the first stage of integration between Gizmo and LiveJournal. I really hope they get to work and implement even tighter features. It’s very interesting that they chose Gizmo instead of the ubiquitous Skype, maybe they’re in a deal with someone else?