San Francisco Goes GaGa for Google

It's official... the City of San Francisco has cast its lot with Google and Earthlink to build a free (at least for the lowest class of service) wireless network blanketing the entire city.

This is a tremendously exciting development for a number of reasons. First, it's probably going to be built out very rapidly. San Francisco is small, and the mayoral administration seems deeply committed to this project. There is also a good likelihood that it will be built out -first- in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods as a political move.

The second reason this is exciting is that Google seems to have big plans to deliver location-based advertising across this network. I imagine that a huge amount of pressure is going to be applied to force them to do this is a way that is privacy observant... I learned last night from a Google insider that the company's project in Mountain View has been delayed considerably by local council and activists bickering over the details of implementation. It's likely that S.F. Will be even worse. I can only imagine when the EFF and minions take on the city and Google over location tracking. The benefit of having these issues worked out in such a liberal basket case as San Francisco may mean that the rest of the country will get prevailing standards that are a lot more open and consumer-friendly than if say Philadelphia continued to be the leading municipal wireless innovator.

The third and final reason this is exciting is that it firmly once again puts San Francisco and the Bay Area ahead of the pack in terms of network infrastructure. This is going to turn the city in to a big sandbox for building interesting new uses of the web and field testing ubiquitous computing in real urban environments. Smart, young people will come here to hack new uses for this infrastructure, and even develop new urban lifestyles around its capabilities. In that sense, this may be an economic development coup that spawns another boom for the city by the Bay.

Comments

[darius]

right on!

http://transitmonger.blogspot.com/2006/04/sf-sacrifices-lamb.html