For all those of you who spend a great deal of time outside the house trying to find and connect to open wireless networks, this is the post for you. WeFi is a free PC application which facilitates the process of finding and connecting to WiFi hotspots in any location. It has recently announced the opening of its public beta.

After you install the WeFi client, you will easily be able to find and connect to WiFi hotspots in your area. You will be able to see the signal strength of the networks, and also skip over the closed (secure) networks.

WeFi also adds an interesting social element to its application. The idea is this: When a user discovers an open network, he is then encouraged to share this spot with the community by marking his location on a map. Top mappers are recognized for their contribution to the community. The client then reports back to WeFi, which then shares the open access point with other WeFi users. The more users contribute, the more knowledge WeFi’s system gains, which also helps to continuously improve the application. Another cool feature is that the map and also the client displays the location of other WeFi users, so you can easily locate your friends.

I believe WeFi provides a real advantage for travelers who can easily see ahead of time where there are hotspots in any location and adjust their plans accordingly.

WeFi will soon announce Twitter support that will allow WeFi users to automatically let their friends know via Twitter where they are located and the name of the network they are connected to. Currently WeFi only works with Windows XP, but Vista and Mac versions are coming out soon. Those of you who spend a great deal of time outside, surfing the net, should definitely give WeFi a try.

Technorati tags: wefi, social, wireless, network, community, wifi, web 2.0, twitter, windows xp, vista, mac

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Social Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.