For those lucky enough to live in the USA, or atleast have a US based Live account, you can now get all the Gold features with your account for 72 hours as they have the first sponsored Free Xbox Live Gold weekend.
While your gamercard will still show as silver on Xbox.com and in the console, the Xbox Live service will ’see’ you as a gold account. That means that all this weekend (3/31-4/2) all US based silver accounts will be able to experience online multiplayer play. If you still have a silver account, now would be a good time to earn some of those multiplayer achievements like the ones in Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighteror Perfect Dark Zero.