Using the Google Map API, to power the site Suramya Tomar created gWiFi to make it easier for the road-warrior’s, students, free loaders etc to find locations that offer free wireless internet access in the New York City area by showing all free wireless nodes on a Map of New York.
Tomar says to have created gWiFi because nothing like this already existed and it is something that a lot of people will find useful. In a request to collaborate he adds:
“The best way to help me would be to point me to a geocoder program/Create a Geocoder program that is not as picky as Geocoder.us. If thats a bit to heavy for you (As its for me) you could instead volunteer to help manually fix the address that Geocoder chokes on“.
Comments
@ 09:06
I recently added Google Maps integration for the Grand Rapids WiFi site - http://grwifi.net - too. Any set of search results can be plotted on a map as well as being presented as a list, and since you can search for locations near to a given address, I’m hoping to soon add a ‘you are here’ marker.
It’s certainly a much more intuitive way of presenting that information than a purely text-based interface, or even the satellite-map-only option I had previously.
@ 09:02
Tomar’s site is hardly the only site that is shopwing a map of wireless networks http://www.nodedb.com/unitedstates/ny/newyork/
has been doing it for a while now. you can get there from http://www.nycwireless.net
that is not to say that the wireless networks on a google map are not cool. However it would be very useful if the mappoints on tomar’s map alkso included wheather networks were free, or if there was some cost, or when the places were open. I would also expect that the free muni wifi hotspots (city hall park, bowling green for example) would be listed. ANd people should also be able to enter their own wireless network.
@ 16:24
Hi Gregory,
Was pointed to this site by a friend and thought I should reply to your comments.
1. I never claimed that mine was the only site that showed wifi spots on maps, just the first to show it on Google Maps.
BTW most of the data on gWiFi right now has been scraped from the nodedb.com website along with some from the Yahoo Mobile site.
2. All nodes shown on gWifi are free (As far as I know)
3. More spots will be added after I release the next version that has a lot of bug fixes/enhancements. (When this would happen depends on how much free time I get to work on gWiFi)
4. Ability to add your own Wifi spots to the map is in the works.
Thanks for the feedback people. Feel free to email me/message me if you have any more comments.
Thanks,
Suramya