Local Content and Social Software for Wireless Hotspots

I had lunch today with Sean Savage, the creator of PlaceSite, a platform for social networking that runs off of public Wi-Fi hotspots.

Sean's got PlaceSite up and running at the Axis Café in the Potrero Hill district of San Francisco, and several more locations are planned in the next few weeks. BTW, Axis has got to be one of the hippest scenes in the city - it's right next to California College of the Arts and has a very L.A. feel to it.

PlaceSite seeks to fix one of the pressing problems of public Wi-Fi... namely that it lets people zone out into their laptops, stop paying attention to the urban space around them, and escape into cyberspace. By greeting users with a rich array of local content and social connections (see screenshot below), PlaceSite seeks to reconnect wireless users to their surroundings.

There are a number of these kinds of projects out there - my former student John Geraci's NeighborNode for example. But PlaceSite is really the most developed. They will probably end up as part of Yahoo or Google or Earthlink if things go well.

It's interesting to think about how computing evolved in the 70s and 80s, starting with LAN applicatins and eventually layering WAN apps like the Web and Internet email on top of that. I wonder if PlaceSite and others like it signal the possible emergence of the opposite trend - that we will see a whole host of applications that are explicitly designed to be exclusively local. And hybrids that will leverage LAN and WAN capabilities.