Chris Pirillo is trying to convince the world to move from Skype to Gizmo. [Via Robert Scoble]
I can see where Podcasters and early adopters are all over Gizmo–it has a built-in recording feature useful for Podcasters, a cool map, and maybe most importantly it uses open standards.
But here’s the key: Skype just works. Does Gizmo?
One of the beauties of Skype is that no matter where I am Skype seems to work. That’s one of the reason’s I rarely even try using MSN Messenger’s built-in audio feature when chatting with someone.
Gizmo’s president Jeff Bonforte responds here that yes, they know what they’re doing and Gizmo is as “agile at traversing NATs as Skype.” His full response to a user that was having some troubles with Gizmo:
As far as the other questions and criticisms from the people above that have never even used Gizmo, we have done WAY more than simply do SIP on UDP. We are as agile at traversing NATs as Skype. People should try the client before making these assumptions. Second, like almost every VoIP service we do lots of P2P. However, we do not need users machines to route calls. We use a private fibre network for that, a strategy we share with little players like Google and Yahoo.
Curiously, a surprisingly large 30% of early Gizmo downloaders are Mac users. Hmmm. Maybe it’s because Gizmo looks good. Maybe it’s because it works better. Only one way to tell. Give it a try.
Yeah, I skipped the whole skype thing and went straight to Gizmo when I heard of it. They’ve done a pretty good job progressively updating the client, the main bug is that it doesn’t quite work with Cisco VPN.
Loren – Gizmo may traverse NATs as well as Skype but it fails when faced with a combination of a network firewall and proxy server – something Skype *has* figured out how to do. This is the number one reason I won’t be switching right away. The second and third are no text chat (IM) and no file transfer. And that’s all just playing catch-up. The recording in Gizmo is OK – not as controllable as most podcasters would like but it is not, in and of itself a compelling enough reason to switch.
FWIW, Pirillo loves tilting at these windmills. He’s been trying to convince the world to switch to Maxthon and to stick with Outlook 2000. I love Chris dearly but he does tend to be on the fringe a bit as these campaigns go. ;^)
I’ve used both Skype and Gizmo, and I have to say that Skype indeed “just works”, while I’ve had nothing but trouble with Gizmo. Still working with both, hoping that Gizmo will eventually show me the goods, but for now, I thik Skype is the superior product.
I could see how Podcasters would be all over it, though.
Thanks for the feedback. This is exactly what I was wondering. I’ll still give Gizmo a spin, but it doesn’t sound like it’s going to tear me apart from Skyping….at least for now.