I really hate to have to rant about another site, but after visiting JiWire today to check for any new free hotspots around town, I feel I've got to vent somewhere. What on earth-if anything-are they thinking? Their hotspot finder used to be one of the most useful on the web for keeping track of new hotspots in a given area-especially free ones. There was a button you could click that would only show you those. You could keep track of the total number listed on the site as well as the total number of free hotspots in any given country or state, and by so doing know when it was time to dig deeper and look for any new ones added. That's where the leads to many of the sites we've reviewed here over the past couple of years came from.
But now...it's all Flash and Java Script, maps and extraneous information. With patience, you can still get it to tell you there are currently 205 free hotspots in Kansas, for example, but dare to try and browse through them and you'll have to hack through a jungle of play-for-pay sites to sift them out.
Nice going, folks. I can understand that you're probably making more from fee than you are from free, but if I owned a site that was the latter, give me one good reason why I'd list it on JiWire now.
I'm waiting.
P. S.: Have you tried using your new finder with Firefox? You should.
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JiWire's new site was designed with the goal to make the directory more discoverable and accessible through both traditional text-based searching, as well as rich interactive maps.
Also, our first launch was this week and we know we still have a lot of cross-browser compatibility issues to clean up in the coming weeks. We're working very hard on polishing up the site.
We also had a goal with this design to embrace free hotspots more fully by making the hotspot submission process dramatically easier. We now funnel all pay networks or multi-hotspot submissions to our new extranet, but individual users who submit one free hotspot at a time now have a very simple form. On the back end, we also have a radically improved database engine and publishing process that gets these submissions into our directory much more quickly.
Another thing you'll notice from our new site is JiWire's emphasis on its advertising model, which is enabling the economics of large-scale commercial *FREE ACCESS* Wi-Fi networks by giving network operators an economic model that covers their operating costs.
With any major site redesign, there will always be bugs and things we can do better, so any and all feedback is appreciated. Please visit JiWire's web site and click on the Contact link to send us anything that you observe or think we should change. All posts to the contact page are trafficked through a support queue system that is monitored by the entire company.
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