Virtually Here

To the computer/social network savvy person WiFi connection is like gas is for your car. Thing is you don’t want to pay close to $5 per gallon for it (or whatever the equivalence would be for WiFi connection fees). You want it fast and you want it free. When you walk into coffee shops today there is a sea of laptops sucking the WiFi out of the air as fast as you can say Twitter. But how do you find these places and if you do, how do you find more - and maybe even other wifi-junkies in your neigbourhood?

Short of walking around, reading reviews online, etc there are now a number of sites aimed at helping you to get online for free - and to find other likeminded people.

Fon has been around for some time now and attempts to establish a community of other FON-users that share their own WiFi with others (requires you to purchase and install a small router) for free. If you are not a FON user you can still acess FON-networks for a rather reasonable fee. It’s a good concept but for me it fell short for two reasons; 1) the need to purchase a router and 2) the charges to non-FON users.

Whisher is another offering that is similar to Fon but it does not require any hardware installation nor does it charge anyone any fees regardless if they are signed up to share their own WiFi or not. It’s a great concept and something that I hope will take off even more than it already have.

WeFi is one of the later products to hit the interweb and it’s one of the more promising in this area. WeFi is all about helping their users to find available, free WiFi wherever they are. After installing the connection software you let the system know where you are located and up comes a map showing you where you can find open hotspots near you. These hotspots have been mapped by other users and you can return the favour by adding the hotspots you know of. The next feature of WeFi is the social aspect of it - you can with a flip of a button see who else is connected to a hotspot through the WeFi software. You can browse their profiles and even start chatting with them. Sounds creepy stalky-prone? It could be, but there is no denying that this does indeed upon up a whole new way to connect with like-minded people through the internet.

WeFi is a great concept but it is suffering from serious teething issues to the point that I have personally found their software to be so unreliable that I have, at least for now, opted to not use it. I’m keeping an eye on their site though in hopes to see signs of improvement.

There are obviously a number of other offering in this area (WeRoam is another promising product) out there but the ones listed here represents some of the more known and ’stable’ services you are likely to find.

So if you often find yourself out and about with a laptop - or any other WiFi enabled gadget - do yourself a favour and check out some of these sites. They may just allow you to add some web-surfing to that grande, non-fat latte I know you’re craving for.

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