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Over at The Fon Blog (unofficial one, that is) antonde has made the claim that the new FON map and the FON counter don't match up. In his sample, less than 10% of the registered foneros showed active WiFi points on the FON map.

Activity of FON Points

In my own sample (my house) the point shows as not being active, but it very definitely is active. FON has some problems to overcome with this map and I'm sure it's just a matter of time. On the one hand, they only want to show points that they are fairly certian are actually working. The most certain test of a "working" router is some recent activity by a fonero on the wifi side of the router. That test is also likely to give "false negatives" such as in the case of my router. It's unlikely that people will use it (I use the wired ethernet side), which marks it as inactive, which makes people unlikely to use it...it's somewhat self-fulfilling. Last night I used the FON wifi network to see how long it would be to show my point as active. Now (12 hours later) it's still not showing as being "active". In my test, the system is overly pessimisting.

Mentiroso FON Counter

antonde also called for FON to 'please stop that “mentiroso” counter on your home page'. Mentiroso is Spanish for "Liar", basically saying that it over-inflated the number of Foneros. Again, in my experience, I was added to the OLD map and I believe I was counted in that number before I had my access point delivered, much less installed and running. The old map and counter were overly optimistic as they counted people as soon as they registered - not based upon actual running routers.

The "right" way to count Foneros?

My personal practice would be to be somewhat pessimistic and only count the points once they've had an active user. However, they should count a router as active if it has had any activity in the past week or month and then also if it has checked in for it's nightly "heartbeat" ping.

For a while now there has been the GetOutfoxed community focused around the Outfoxed browser extension.

The company and the extension

A few months ago the project started to get "real" with investors, and office space, and desks, and chairs. They've now relaunched under the name "Lijit" as in "legit" as in "legitimate" as in "what you would say about a page that you think is good". This is an interesting project to me because it uses some of my favorite technology, it's a company in Colorado.

The extension is basically a way to say that something is "good, bad, or dangerous" and you can apply that rating to web pages or domains. Then other people (your friends, family, coworkers) create a trust network listening to your advice and giving you advice (the network connections can be one way if someone trusts you but you don't trust them). It's pretty clear to see that this could be extended from just web pages and applied to other things in life (email senders, operating system processes, etc.) and all of a sudden it's great. It takes a lot of cool products that have been going around takes them one step further. Really brilliant stuff.

Drupal Site - Pretty Theme

Additionally, they've got a really pretty page layout - pretty standard stuff in a lot of ways: The section across the bottom with categories and links within those categories. Right hand navigation. Fixed width site. Fancy 3-d Logo (though it could use a dropshadow). I'm not a super huge fan of the colors, but what I am a fan of is that when you look at the site it's clearly got a designer's hand in the look and feel. Many people complain that it's hard to theme Drupal - and yet there are so many examples to the contrary, this being one.

That's about it - help spread the love, won't you? And Digg the new Lijit site.

I've been to Capital Tea before, but today I'm writing from Capital Tea as I came here for an afternoon work session. So, this is testament to their WiFi which works fine for me.

Today I had a delicious iced chai - unsweetened as the milk in there provided enough sugar for my tastes.

Also, they announced some new Fall hours - I'm not sure how long these will last, but they're valid now.

Monday: Closed
Tuesday-Friday: 7am to 4pm
Saturday and Sunday: 11am to 4pm

They also freshened up the front since the last time I was here. Visitors are now greeted by some planters that have potato vines spilling out of them, some nice little pink and purple flowers, and tall cattails. Delightful.

Meeting Anita Martin

This past spring I had the pleasure of working on a project with Anita Martin. The project was relatively complex - not because the work was technical, but because the client was really a community of about 30 involved people and over 10,000 total potential "customers". Anita was very helpful and understanding as the liason between the community and me.

People often say "what is google thinking with {insert name of their new serivce}?"

Google and Open Source Project Hosting

At the OSCON this summer they announced Google Code Project Hosting a Sourceforge like open source project hosting environment. It's inline with some of their other projects like Summer of Code, a project where Google pays university students to spend their summers working on open source projects. A system where Drupal got 14 projects (a value of over US$70,000 - listen to a summary of the progress in Lullabot Podcast #23).

Now, when they announced the whole Project Hosting thing it seemed like a nice thing for them to do for up and coming projects - but it also seemed more than a little redundant. If you're a small or medium project then Sourceforge will work great. If you're a larger project then maybe you need to use the OSUOSL (consider donating to them). Either way, it seemed more than redundant for Google to offer this hosting.

Mozilla Talkback

Mozilla has long used a system called Talkback and it uses a closed source, proprietary system that requires a license and is owned by a company called SupportSoft. People complain about this system all the time in forums saying "mozilla should build their own talkback system" to which the response is "why don't you build it as your own open source project and let us use it" to which the repsonse is usually something like "oh, I don't code, you should write it for me on your own time". You can guess how I feel about this exchanges...

So, I've written in the past about how I think that the FON Crowdsourcing business model is pretty brilliant. And the relatively simple system of Bills, Linuses, and Aliens.

Profitability Numbers

Recently celebrated 1000 passes sold and I've also read that he believes they will be profitable if they make $1/router/month. At 80,000+ routers that's not a bad wad of cash for a shoelace company. Also, everyone is talking about the partnership with Skype as a way for Skype users to have wifi mobile phones. That's an interesting idea, but my money is that their partnership with Skype is also about using FON routers as super nodes (see Robert Cringely's article on the problems with Skype super nodes). Also, Google funded FON without much clear synergy for Google. At the time it started hiring and funding Mozilla Firefox referrals, people took a little while to understand that beyond just "being nice" this secured Google as default search engine in Firefox and that default search engine is easily worth far more than a $1/referral for the search engine ad revenue.

So, beyond the partnerships bringing in money FON is relying on two sources of revenue: Aliens and roaming Bills

How the Digerati Can Game the FON Model

Now, I haven't tried this yet, but here's where I see the way to "game" the FON model. Basically, if you are like the majority of the FON users you live in a place where you are unlikely to get many Aliens visiting your house. So, there is little to no motivation for you to be a Bill. Given that, you sign up as a Linus so that you can roam for free. Now, if you eventually do have a place where you might make some money from Aliens then you register as a Bill. You make money from this location and yet still roam for free. While this is a bit of a weakness of the business model, the reality is that there aren't that many people who will take advantage of it.

So, we had another wine tasting night and it was delicious. This time, being the end of summer, we had white wines from a Spanish speaking country (or Portugal, cause hey, I love me a Portugese Vinho Verde). Anyway, after the fiasco last time where everyone's favorite was the last bottle ordered this time we let people try out wines in any order they wanted...with a slight exception...one of the people bringing wine forgot buy until the day of, and they purchased a warm bottle so we threw it in the fridge for a while. And we didn't get it out until the end. Guess which bottle won? The one that was in the fridge and that we drank last.

Damn the man.

Anyway, here's the data: