Just saw the piece on the TV the other day about Google and the weather balloon initiative. It apparently has been dubbed, “Project Loon.” How apropos. Bringing internet at 3Gish speeds to the unwired masses? I’ll leave the details to the other blogs but apparently Google envisions a floating armada of these things that users with a “special antenna” – sort of a nebulous phrase there which probably means “with Chromebooks”- will be able to use.
You can see the Project Loon page at http://www.google.com/loon/. They do stop short, from what I see, from using the actual word “beta.” Interesting. Pilot testers. Do like their simple page for it though – nice little responsive ditty. I notice that their meta description size is just a couple characters under 500. Hmmm….
Reading a few articles, not sure how testy the connection might be. Think about it – a balloon floating around up there handling your internet connections? Probably as reliable as our local downtown wifi system – it’s there, but no one can ever use it…
As mentioned above, and the whole Google and their annoying “beta” thing. If this passes the “pilot testing” phase, it likely will end up being in “beta” for the rest of its’ lifetime. How many things do we end up seeing from Google that are never “officially supported” because it’s “beta”?? I’m not even sure at this point if they actually “officially” support GMail yet. I gave up expecting any type of support if I had issues with any Google product a LONG time ago. There might be a great market here for the balloon internet customers. An alert system that the internet is back up as balloon floats in and out of range. “You have internet!” (a la the old, “You have MAIL!” from AOL) That way you wouldn’t have to sit and keep clicking refresh over and over again. Hmmm… a new project – LOL.
I personally think they’ll be loading these balloons up with AdWords campaign come-ons (like I get in the mail on a near daily basis) and dropping them to those that just AREN’T spending enough with Google already.
Look for YOUR Google AdWords campaign offer dropping from the stratosphere near YOU today!
you guys scare me