April 1, 2007

FON takes friendly wireless neighbourhoold worldwide

fon logo

The concept behind FON is simple: you share your Internet connection at home in exchange for free Wifi from someone else on the service when you’re not a home. Billing itself as the “Largest Wifi Community in the World”, FON translates the principle of the good neighbour to a global scale.

At first, I thought that was it, a friendly community of shared wifi access points. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that FON’s business model sounds reasonably straight-forward. Members who share their home internet connections through FON get to access any FON site for free. However, even those who don’t share internet connection at home (known as “aliens”) can still access FON wifi points by purchasing a $3 day-pass. Those FON members who would rather take a 50% share of the revenue from “aliens” than have free access to the remote wifi community can do so.

A quick search of the FON wifi maps revealed that quite a few places around my neighbourhood are already connected.

Gspace

gspace logo

Gspace allows you to use your gmail account like a remote hard drive. It’s a Firefox extension that you access through your browser’s status bar. Once you’ve configured it to connect with your gmail account (a 10 second setup), you can begin transferring files back and forth. The Gspace interface configures a “virtual” drive, and even allows you to create sub-directories. While I originally surmised that the utility was going to create actual gmail folders, it seems to use a clever subject line naming structure to create and manage folders (and store meta-data from your uploaded files). Brilliantly simple. I was just thinking how much I’d love to see this extended into the Windows shell (so that it can be used beyond Firefox) when I discovered GMail Drive.

Both work very well, although I did run into an issue uploading long filenames using GMail Drive which weren’t experienced using Gspace. Unfortunately Gspace makes a bit of a mess of your inbox, while GMail Drive was configurable to operate out of your less used “Drafts” folder.