Gizmo Project for LJ Talk

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With the release (news) of LJ Talk came the official release of the LiveJournal-branded version of Gizmo Project. It is noted that the "Read LiveJournal's annoucement" link at the bottom of the page simply links to LiveJournal's homepage instead of an entry like this one (news).

[edit] Features of the program

• You can have voice chats with other users as well as instant message chats.
• You can "call" Gizmo user ljvoicepost to record a Voice Post and post it to your journal.
• You can record calls with another user.
• You can map the locations of both users during calls.
• You can receive "voicemails" from other users when not signed on.
• You can buy credit which will allow you to "call out"--that is, call phone numbers.

[edit] Resulting and possible issues from the release

• The Jabber ID in the form of exampleusername@livejournal.com was added to the Contact Info section of Profile pages without an option to turn it off. However, it does hinge upon the "show my contact info to these people" option. In a later release, they will add the option to turn off this line individually. Although the showing of the ID is not exactly a privacy violation, it could be picked up as an email by spammer bots and it represents a valid email for any paid users who have that option set up. Other people do not want to give the impression that they will be able to be contacted through LJ Talk, since they do not intend to ever use it.

• When logging into the LiveJournal-branded Gizmo Project for the first time, you receive an email to the address associated with your LiveJournal account welcoming you to the service.

• The default action on double clicking a user on the contact list is to call, not IM. Some people might not want to accidentally make this mistake.

• Gizmo makes it extremely easy to record calls. It warns the other party when recording starts and stops; however, permission from the other party is not required.

• Voicemailing is on by default. Each time you get a "voicemail" from another user using the service, you will receive an email to the address associated with your LiveJournal account telling you that you have received a voicemail and it will include the voice message as an attached wav file. This could be a potential problem for users with small mailboxes. It could also be seen as unwanted or unsolicited mail. You have to "set up" your Gizmo project account for this to happen, but logging in once to the Gizmo project program is sufficient action to let this happen. You can turn voicemail off by going to the Account menu on the Mac version and the Edit menu on the Windows version and selecting "Voicemail Settings...".

• When on a "call" with another user, Gizmo offers a "Map It!" option in which you can open a Google Maps window and see your location and the other user's location to see the relative location between the two. We believe it does this by IP, but are not positive yet. In any case, it is not getting the information, if available, from the profile page of the users. This could prove to be a security violation.