Nate Ritter

Another exciting thing has happened today! Placesite has been rescued from the perils of internet dot com death! Oh, it’s like Christmas all over again for me!

I noticed TechCrunch’s post about the E27 Symposium. The second thing I noticed is that I’m too old now to enter. You have to be younger than 27. Frick! I’m ancient in internet years.

But, back to the point. Placesite is a wonderful technology that I believe has a huge potential to capture the need for community and face-to-face out of the internet. It’s simple router firmware which changes your simple Linksys router into a community portal. I’m so freaking jealous right now I’m about to pee my pants.

The idea is to install it in coffee shops, condo and apartment complexes, etc. Anywhere where there’s a local community wi-fi connection. What’s great about this is it merges the small wi-fi zone of connection with those who use it often with the intention of getting those people to meet and see their common ground - thus starting a relationship face-to-face.

I’m giddy.

Update

This just in: I received an email back from Sean at Placesite. Here’s my original email to him:

Guys,

I just noticed you’re project isn’t dead! TechCrunch mentioned you’re at the E27 symposium and I wish I could be there to speak with you personally. However, I am absolutely killing myself waiting to see when you will release something for download.

Please… please, when will something be available to test? Even beta, or anything really. I’m dying to promote you guys to the hilt!

And here’s his response to me:

Nate, I’m touched!

Rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated. In fact, we’re live in a San Francisco cafe.
We never shut down, we’re just in a period of publicity-silence as we test and hammer out the product so it will be reliable and usable when we roll it out in the big cafes and release the code for folks like you to hack on and set up in your own neighborhoods. (Well.. with Techcrunch we’re no longer in publicity -silence- but still keeping it down.)

Hang in there; we’re all working on side jobs to pay the rent, but we’ll get it out to you as soon as we can.

Thanks for the weblog post and merry “Christmas all over again.”

Sean

Technorati Tags: social, network, community, router, linksys, firmware, placesite, web 2.0, web2.0, web 3.0, web3.0, e27, symposium