For the uninitiated, Fon.com is “the largest wifi community in the world”. You let others share your wifi, they let you share theirs, a pretty good idea for people visiting other towns and cities (assuming there’s coverage). They even gave away a free wifi router with DMZ capability, mine arrived the other week, but as yet I havn’t set it up, and I’m really unhappy with them.
By default it shows you a map (in my case of the UK) and lots of little dots placed at the address you gave for the wireless point in your settings, it even shows you the address of the dot. That’s right when you sign up for Fon’s service you get your name and address plastered across a map, showing you exactly where it is!!!
You are supposed to be able to change this via the “My Personal Info” page, but all I get when I do is a blank page.
With all the fuss recently over personal info being exposed via social networking sites, I have to admit this is the only one that’s caused me any concern, I didn’t see a warning telling me that my address was going to be shown on a map, along. There is advice on how to make it less specific, but I feel it should be the other way around .
To make matters worse, there seems to be a problem with the My Personal Info page as I write this, and it just ends up at a blank page, and the details are left blank.
UPDATE: 24hrs since I emailed their tech support, and the service still seems to be down. I’m starting to look for the “Close Account” button
UPDATE (14/06): Over a week, and still no update, still unable to change my details.
Update: Yes, I was.
Filed under: constructive, criticism, frustration, linkedin, myspace, social networking
I just signed up with yet another social network, except this one claims to connect all your friends, regardless of the network they’re on. Sounds good!
Trouble is, as far as I can see, it links them by having them also sign up for yet another social network, rather than linking all the existing ones, like the tagline kind of promised.
I was rather hoping it’d use API’s from places like Flickr & MySpace to gather all your friends in one place, but if it does, I can’t find it. At the moment it looks like nothing more than a place for people gather a big list of people to call “friends”, and if it’s anything like ComicSpace, I won’t have heard of any of them.
