Google’s Expansion into Wifi: The Empire Reaches Out

Here is more on Google. As many of you may have heard, they are expanding into offering wifi using their free, ad based business model. Paul Callahan provides an excellent summary of Google's wifi efforts to date in big blog, paul callahan...mostly common sense re: networks. He also links to an Info World article, Google eyes how mobile devices will use city Wi-Fi , that covers how they are starting in San Francisco. It includes the provision of location based ads.

Paul offers a useful example of how this might work and make even more money for Google, “…combining the physical world with the Internet will yield rich new data about the behavior of the masses. If the vast majority of Google Wi-Fi users search for doughnuts when passing through Union Square in San Francisco, … the value of the advertising space in that rough location goes up and up (for doughnuts). If Krispy Kreme wants an ad in that wireless zone, it will have to pay more.”

This picks up on what Micheal Fedor wrote about in his post on the possibilities of mobile mashups (see my Monday post. The options seem endless, just add in Google maps coupled with location based services. Michael said you could locate all your buddies as they go clubbing on Saturday night and arrange to meet up. Google can know here you are and where you are discussing going (via email, blogs, even cell phones?) so they can target the right pizza ad or taxi service. Paul also talks about location based advertising through wi-fi in his post, Got my free Wi-Fi -- but now I want location.

Google already reads the content in our Google email to target it s ads. But then do we really want everyone to be able to know where we are and what we are doing and saying all the time? Do we really want one company having all the playing field and data? I can see the synergy for better services and I like the targeted ads so far on my blog. I can also see anti-trust possibilities but I am sure the Google guys have been thinking about this for a long time. I can also see unwanted monitoring in the wrong hands but I also see this as evitable anyway so we might as well attempt to keep it open and regulate it somehow. I do not pretend to have the answers here but the issues are huge.

Paul Callahan has been involved with networks and wifi for many years and his blog is full of good stuff on the subject.