Show HN: Wifis.org - making WiFi networks 'social'

A friend of mine built this as an evening side-project and launched it about a year ago.<p>With pretty much no effort, it got picked up by theNextWeb, RWW, BoingBoin and others: <a href="http://www.wifis.org/p/press" rel="nofollow">http://www.wifis.org/p/press</a><p>He only told me about it today and I haven't seen it on HN before, so I told him the Hacker News community would be a good place to get some feedback.<p>He hasn't tried monetising it yet, but I'm trying to convince him there is something there. In my mind it could be the 'AirBnB of WiFi networks'. What do you think?

This has potential but it needs more focus. Instead of making it so open ended (i.e. Want to grab a beer? -- which is kind of creepy), make it very specific. This is a service for allowing neighbors to easily share Wifi. It helps subsidize your wifi costs, etc.<p>You may already be doing this, but then you need to add/build the following:<p>- A way to actually take/manage payments from your neighbors.<p>- A way to manage access to the Wifi network (it's kind of like Lockitron for your wifi network in this way)<p>Once you have the idea simplified and the tools required to make this work end-to-end, as a potential user I'd rename my network to "RENT ME: Awesome Wifi Network" and see what happens.<p>Food for thought!

Fairly obvious practical detail --<p>I'm at someplace new, where I don't have internet. I see if there are any open networks, no dice, but I see an encrypted network as www.wifis.org/poop. I think "oh, great, maybe my neighbor is friendly and I'll just go ahead and emai-- wait, I don't have internet, so I can't even visit the link."<p>Later I'm at a coffee shop seeing if FiOS is available in my area or double checking whether or not I live in Kansas City, and I think "oh, right that URL", but by then it's already disappeared from my SSID list.<p>Who's gonna have the forethought to write the URL down?<p>Explicit instructions in the SSID itself might encourage people to jot something down when they do finally get internet access. SSIDs are limited to 32 chars. The best I could come up with was:<p><pre><code> ask me for access:hi@domain.com </code></pre> Of course, even better would be to do something clever like -- make an SSID called "Friends in Building Wifi", that's open access. Upon connecting, you get pushed a page that says "Want to share my bill? Send me a message with this form". The message then gets passed on to you, and then you can go walk downstairs and chit chat, or whatever. This way your neighbor can message you without requiring internet to do so, as wifis.org does. (And then, naturally, put your actual internet on a different WPA2-protected SSID.)

This is a good idea. The market is fairly small (people who are both tech savvy enough to understand what's going on and altruistic enough to want to participate), but that's ok.<p>I see very clear benefits over just putting your email address in your SSID. 1)Anonymity 2)Users may learn to trust the wifis.org brand. People can leave feedback about you on the site. I kind of see it as a couchsurfing for wifi.<p>That being said, I wouldn't bother trying to monetize. It can't cost him more than a few bucks a month to run this and unless he changes the product a bit (either provide higher value or larger market), I don't see monetization being particularly successful. Right now it is a great resume builder and a way to promote other projects that may be more lucrative (e.g. "Hey remember the guy from wifis.org, well now he's working on X"). If he's really worried about the hosting costs, he can put a donate button on the page.

It's a clever idea. I'm not 100% sure I'd use it because I'm not totally sure what the benefits are vs the potential downside (spam? e-mails saying LET ME USE UR NETWORK QUICKLY PLS). Maybe I'm too cynical, though.

How does it compare to <a href="http://www.fon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fon.com/</a> , <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FON" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FON</a> ?

What's the advantage over renaming my network to "@mikeash", "twitter.com/mikeash", "<a href="http://mikeash.com/" rel="nofollow">http://mikeash.com/</a>, or similar?

It seems like an interesting idea. But without wifi access, it's hard to visit a page to send an email.

interesting idea, but how can the user contact the owner when he currently doesn't have an active internet connection ?<p>I guess the user has to contact the owner from a different device that has internet access.<p>and why not just rename my SSID to ContactMeForFreeWifi@somemail.com ?<p>How about some software which actually lets the other person with no internet access contact me ( via WiFi ), of course security should be taken care of .

i have an open wifi that my neighbours can use. the biggest problem is establishing consensus about how it should be used.<p>what i <i>intend</i> is that anyone can use it, particularly for emergencies, but that you don't use it so much you damage my performance (or break the law).<p>i kind of assumed that was obvious. but in practice i need to ban someone about every 6 months. i just use the mac address to drop everything except port 80 tcp, which gets sent to a "you were banned because..." page.<p>that works fine - people aren't smart enough or motivated enough to work round the mac block - but it's too late, in that the person has lost all access as part of learning about the expected use.<p>so, anyway, for me that's what needs to be solved here - educating users about what is acceptable use of open wifi. i'm not really sure this solves it (i doubt people will actually look at the url in the ssid).

This makes so much sense in high-rise apartment buildings where everyone has their own cable connection and wireless router. The cable companies don't want you to share your connection -- they want everyone to pay up. But sharing is much cheaper for end-users. Good luck with this, smart idea. Incentivizing broad adoption is the hard part. ;)

Is there any limit to what type of info you could place in the 32 byte SSID field? It could be an email address. It could be some other plain text. It could be encrypted text. It could be a public key. It could be a 32 byte "blog". Or a 32 byte "tweet". Use your imagination.<p>On your mark, get set, file your bogus software patents!

Neat idea. Here's another I've been stewing on for a while: give every wifi point a wall/chatroom that's only writable (and maybe, only readable) by people using the same public (behind-NAT) IP address.<p>One problem with SSIDs for messaging is how their display is often truncated. (iOS's wifi screens are a bad offender here.)

Several years ago I set my AP name to one of my email addresses with the express purpose of being able to share WiFi if someone needed brief internet access. No one has ever contacted me about using my WiFi. Perhaps I needed to name it "Want WiFI? email me ..." to make it clearer.

Having the ssid as a url is a nice idea. Instead of charging neighbours to use your net, perhaps it could be used to collaborate a mesh net or something?<p>Edit: Hey, the meshnet project is really taking off... <a href="https://projectmeshnet.org/" rel="nofollow">https://projectmeshnet.org/</a>

Someone should start making me social, instead of making my wifi...

I don't understand why?

You could just put some piece of contact info in your ESSID?

I got a few of my friends to sign up using the invitation link, but have not received my extra WiFi IDs. I can't find any way to contact WiFis.org, either.

If you built a way for people to pay each other into this (like Stripe Connect, for example) this could be interesting.

this is a very bad idea! Since the concept of "Störerhaftung" got introduced (interferer accountability), the account holder will be held liable for copyright infringement.<p>This is not hyptothetical. It happened to a friend of mine, she has to pay around 1500€ I think.

need to connect this with Karma <a href="https://yourkarma.com/" rel="nofollow">https://yourkarma.com/</a>