Most of us are familiar with those cheap 10-10 numbers we can all use to call friends or family members during those holiday times of year. And if you're more technically advanced, you've probably even used such things as Skype or instant messaging to stay connected.

Today I've discovered an even better option for staying connected, not only during the busy holiday season, but for any time of year. It's called goober. Goober is a young company that appears to have great potential in the consumer and small business markets with its chat and telephony technology. As I was sniffing around the Internet I came across a website called www.yourgoober.com [1]. This site was able to give me a clear breakdown of the features goober offers. In addition, this was the only goober website I found that offered free minutes for new and existing user registrations (and a chance to win more minutes through their slogan contest).

If you're like me and don't live in the same place as most of your family and friends and struggle to stay connected, goober may be worthwhile to test out. Finding good, reliable, and inexpensive products and services to be able to stay in contact with my loved ones is a very high priority for me. I've tested many chat and VoIP products over the last few years including Skype, MSN, Yahoo!, Google, ICQ, AIM, Pidgin, Vonage, and local ISP-provided VoIP products. Goober's voice quality and chat features alone are superior to all of these. It may be because they don't have as many users on their network yet or it may also be that they have bigger pipes than the others. There are some features that goober does not yet provide, but will release sometime in early Q1 2008 including Mac & Linux support; Yahoo!, AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, and IRC integration; Video Chat; and gooberMail; just to name a few.

Here's how you can get those 60 free minutes:

• Go to www.yourgoober.com [2]
• You can choose to participate in the slogan contest or not. Either way you still get 60 minutes free.
• Click on "Personal" or "Business"
• Click on the big "Download" button
• Download and install goober
• Create new goober user account
• Be sure to activate the account by clicking on the link you receive via email
• Log into goober
• Click on the green $ sign on the top right of the Contact List window
• Enter in the information it requests
• Click on "Redeem Voucher"
• Enter the following code: EXPACK07

Now that you have goober and the free minutes, I'll give you a goober 101 on how to use them. You can dig out your computer headset, click on the little red telephone icon on the bottom of your Contact List window, and dial the desired number using that keypad (similar to Skype).

OR...if you don't like being attached to your computer while you call someone, which I don't, you can click on that link that says "No headset? Placing calls without your PC." Once you click on that, enter in YOUR telephone number (doesn't matter which one, whichever one you want to talk on) and the telephone number of the person you want to reach. Goober will then call both of you. That way you are talking through the goober network but don't have to be sewn to your PC to do it and it's usually much cheaper than dialing direct.

You can see for yourself how clear the voice quality is and how inexpensive it is to call (12 cents a minute to Iran!). After every call you can click on that green $ sign to see how many minutes you've used and how much that particular call cost. Goober's website also gives you a breakdown of each country's rate for calls and sending text messages.

In addition to the telephony capabilities, goober's feature set today includes the following:

• Secure multi-chat
• Free voice chat from PC to PC
• Integration with MSN and ICQ messenger contacts
• Text messaging: you can send a text message from goober and the receiver will see it's from YOU not some random name or number
• Secure data transfer between goober users
• Data storage and sharing with your own goober WebFolder
• Instant slideshows with your goober contacts
• Free TV & Radio from various countries around the world
• Music playlists that you can share with other goober contacts
• Unique, silly emoticons that really make you LOL
• goober is available in English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese (additional languages coming soon, even Persian I've heard!)
• gooberMobile - chat from anywhere
• gooberCall - kind of like a calling card, but much better quality, cheaper rates, and automatically integrates with your mobile phone address book

While other VoIP providers or cheap 10-10 numbers are oversaturated during the holiday season, give goober a try. With the free download, free 60 minutes, and a ton of free features, it's worth a shot. I've officially canned all my other instant messaging products and am only on goober now.