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From the comments, a fresh rumor about Brad Fitzpatrick, the LiveJournal founder widely believed to be working on social networks at Google. The commenter, who claims to work at Google, says Fitzpatrick is actually working on free, ad-supported Wi-Fi. Curious, since Google's Wi-Fi projects have faced trouble recently. A deal with San Francisco for free Wi-Fi fell apart thanks to Google partner EarthLink's straitened finances. Why would a tech star like Fitzpatrick work on such a seemingly doomed project? With that caveat, the report on Fitzpatrick's new project, from googleyes, after the jump.

Brad is not working on social graph problems at Google. He came here to work on technology to insert ads into web pages being viewed via Google's municipal Wi-Fi hotspots. Very hush-hush; the only thing publicly available on this is the patent applications. We've been working on it for a while and Brad is working on making it more palatable to the privacy crowd (mostly marketing, actually).

The "social graph," is, for the unitiated, a technical term for social networks much in vogue these days.