I personally think that MS is going to do the following. They're going to allow free online play to silver users as well, but, the other stuff, like parties, private chats, twitter, facebook, zune, last.fm and netflix, are only going to be available to gold members. They will probably add some new stuff as well. If they do this, the Gold price will go up, and people can't complain about not playing online for free anymore. I think that's their plan.
They can't really make it free right now, because people who already paid for a year, are gonna ask what happened to their money, and Gold does not give a real advantage over Silver now, except for the online gaming itself, so they need to make a big difference between Gold and Silver that is worth the money, if they are going to make online play free. They must, otherwise people will keep seeing more value in Sony and will eventually ditch the X360 for multi-plats, and that's basically the X360's strongest point right now....
Truth does not fear investigation
