by JQ Adams

Created on: December 02, 2008

When it comes to offers for free stuff on the internet, rarely is the free item or service offered ever actually free. There's almost always a catch to the deal that makes it really not worth your while. Sometimes you have to sign up for a free trial of a service and then get charged when you forget to cancel it. Other times you have to complete all sorts of offers to get your free item, and almost always your email address will be sold to spammers. There are a few good free deals online, but they are few and far between. One of these great deals is from a company calling

ThePudding is offering completely free long distance service online.

ThePudding's free long distance service is currently in an open beta, and will allow you to make completely free long distance calls through a VoIP phone service. You'd think this would be an unsustainable practice since long distance phone calls have a cost which will add up over time, but ThePudding has come up with a very unique system to allow them to give out free phone calls and still make a healthy profit margin.

The way ThePudding makes their money is through advertisements which are pretty typical. The company has developed advanced software which will translate the words you say on the phone into English, and then display specific targeted advertisements based on what you are having a conversation about. As you talk on the computer, advertisements will be displayed in your web-browser.

Many people will have privacy concerns because ThePudding is technically listening to your phone calls, but they have a fairly iron clad terms of service which states that they only use it to display targeted advertisements in your web-browser when you're making a call and they don't sell your email address. If you're making top-secret calls to the CIA, chances are you probably wouldn't want to use the service, but otherwise there's not much to worry about.

There's absolutely no software to install to make this program work, it's all based completely in your web-browser. This is a definite plus because it makes it a lot easier to use, and since there's no software being installed on your computer, you don't have to worry about the company installing dangerous spyware on your system.

ThePudding is a very innovative service, the market place will decide whether or not it stands the test of time, but for the time being the company is offering a very good deal to its users. Most companies are charging 3-5 cents a minute for long distance service, but with ThePudding, these long distance calls are completely free.

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