Microblogging (also known as nanoblogging) is very popular these days. Services like twitter, jaiku or sweetter offer you a limited length to express yourself. Despite of its restrictive average size (140 characters per entry), they are first-class citizens on the Internet-based self-expression media.
However, they lack of one of the most basic desirable communication requirements: broadcasting to your close physical environment.
I own a spare Wi-Fi Access Point at home. I live in a neighborhood full of university students hungry for free Internet access. Some of them might be computer science students and we are holding a protest demonstration next December 18th. What have I done? I set up the Access Point with the following SSID: “Huelga_Informatica_18_Dic”. I haven’t put any password since it is not connected to my home network or the Internet. So those students might see my unprotected wireless network and I catch their attention.
After I did that, I had a thought: picoblogging. How would you express something in 32 characters (and only a reduced subset of the ASCII ones)? If twitter users got used to the 140 char restriction, how about this? I know it is less than 80%, but if you found what to tell exactly, you might use it!
It is not only about broadcasting ideas o messages, but also about a commercial use for this idea. As we know, Microsoft Windows automatically connect to preferred and known access points (unless you state it not to). However, if you change the SSID, it won’t and you probably know what most of users would do: look up in the connection manager for another unsecured access point.
Now, let’s suppose we have a grocery store in my neighborhood and we set up a Wi-Fi access point providing free (but balanced and limited) Internet access. We are going to reach at least 50 people (I conducted an in-house test with my roommates and we got 46 people connected). If we change SSIDs at least each two days, we could make them to read our new offers while looking for our SSID. See Discount_In_Carrots, Kiwi_3Euro_Kilo or 10ApplesFor5Euros.
Of course, we can’t guarantee we are going to get fifty new clients, but it would suffice whether we got 15 new ones. We could think of another scenario too: train stations or airports. Not every airport or train station offer free wi-fi and they are full of restaurants and people willing internet access :)
What are you going to broadcast today?
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Filed under: Web 2.0
My name is Rafa Vargas. I'm an undergraduate student of 
The main problem is that you are broadcasting adds to a very small amount of people that might see it for 1 or 2 seconds, just enough to click in your unprotected nerwork, realize that you are cheating them when they got no connection and then go out.
That also wouldn’t benefit the public image of the advertised business as people, even those that use to stole unprotected wifi access, will start to loose confidence in the products because they might see them as spam or some kind of fool’s day joke.