(Photo: Travelpod)

The dog days of summer are upon us, but there's a bright spot gleaming like Gatsby's green light from the West side of Manhattan. Google Offers, which apparently still exists, has teamed up with Boingo to provide free Wifi in six subway stations this summer. Can you imagine the awesomeness of being able to check your email while waiting on a sticky, rat-ridden platform for the ever-elusive M train?

Google, you are a benign overlord indeed. But unfortunately for East siders and those in the outer boroughs, all of the Wifi-equipped stations are on the West side of Manhattan:

• A, C, E station at Eighth Avenue and West 14th Street
• L station at Eighth Avenue and West 14th Street
• C, E station at Eighth Avenue and West 23rd Street
• 1, 2, 3 station at Seventh Avenue and West 14th Street
• F, M station at Sixth Avenue and West 14th Street
• L station at Sixth Avenue and West 14th Street

Actually, though Google is advertising this as "six NYC subway stations," the list shows that it's more like four, since the A, C, E and L trains are at the same 8th Ave station, as are the F, M and L at Sixth Ave.

But, all good things must come to an end sometime: Google and Boingo's goodnatured Wifi experiment expires on September 7th.

Ms. Pische (Google+)

Daily deals were on the rise last year, and for a few heady months everyone got really excited about them. Groupon's copy was still cute and quirky and hadn't yet begun to tip over into cloying; 2-for-1 skydiving lessons were still a happy novelty; this reporter even interviewed for a Google Offers copywriting gig (and no, she didn't get it).

But then came that faint gloom cloud, and suddenly the daily deal business model was being called into question. And frankly, it got really, really tiring to delete emails from Groupon, Living Social and Google Offers on a regular basis for coupons we would occasionally buy and then never use.

That's why we're thankful for Unsubscribe Deals, a new web application from a "recovering lawyer" named Edwin Hermawan and a West Village waitress named Lea Pische. In one easy step, the app connects to your Gmail account and automatically unsubscribes you from the deals emails you signed up for, including Groupon, Amazon Local and Daily Candy.

From an email Ms. Pische sent us:

We started at a hackathon. At Pivotal Labs if you must know. We were trying to hijack a Pivotal Labs engineer and find our mythical tech cofounder. All we got were awkward interactions and a random conversation about postgreSQL.

While stumbling home, we started checking our text messages and emails... and we kept getting these emails from daily deal sites. My ESPN digest and fantasy league update totally got lost.

So we woke up, called our our favourite Polish front end coder and a favor from my Muay Thai sparring partner (he happens to be a really good designer that I could never ever afford) and made UnsubscribeDeals.com.

We help the 99% that get flooded by daily deal emails. What side are you on?

We think Ms. Pische and Mr. Hermawan might have careers in creative writing or PR should this whole Unsubscribe Deals thing not work out.

Sorry, GOOG, but we're gonna hold out for the Groupon of the Google Offer. Either that or keep it local and get Yipit to send up a round of deals on deals.

So I sez to the guy, what about my turkey meatballs?

The markets reacted to Google's acquisition of venerable guide brand Zagat, pushing Open Table's stock price down eight percent. The move is based on the assumption that Google is trying to get closer to the action in terms of reviews, reservations and someday payments.

JP Morgans analyst Doug Anmuth thinks Google will integrate Zagat across a wide variety of products, especially Maps and the newly formed daily deals unit, Google offers. On the pure search side, Mr. Anmuth predicts this will allow Google to claim higher quality search leads and thus charge higher rates fir advertising.

Google has been on a shopping spree Since Larry Page took the reigns as CEO and shows no signs of slowing down. According to recent reports the search giant is willing to pay far more for Hulu than the other bidders involved to overcome any reservations the TV networks might have about selling to an online advertising powerhouse.

In recent moths Betabeat has covered the departure of several high profile staffers from Zagat to startup land, including its chief revenue officer and head of mobile. No doubt the atmosphere at WeWork Labs is exciting, although something tells us the staff cafe doesn't quite match up to the Googleplex. As for Tim and Nina Zagat, who started the company 30 years ago as a guide to New York eateries, this is a massive and well deserved win.

The happy couple, in dotcom days.

If you've ever tried to click on a restaurant listing off of Google Places, well, let's just say it makes you miss Yelp. And if you've ever used Google Offers instead of Groupon, then you'd be the first person Betabeat has ever heard of.  This might explain why Google just acquired Zagat. After failing to acquire both Yelp and Groupon, Zagat's millions of ratings and reviews "will be a cornerstone of our local offering," writes Google's Marissa Mayer in a peppy post announcing the news.

The deal price has yet to be disclosed, but as Business Insider points out, Zagat took a reported $200 million acquisition price off the table back in 2008 when it couldn't find any buyers. Indeed, although Ms. Mayer touts Zagat's 32-year-old history (they made the Silicon Alley Reporter 100 list back in 2001 for being ahead of this whole internet thing) and the fact that  "their surveys may be one of the earliest forms of UGC (user-generated content)—gathering restaurant recommendations from friends, computing and distributing ratings before the Internet as we know it today even existed," Zagat questionnaires seem a touch out-of-date with more lightweight UGC in these more mobile times, i.e. Yelp, Foursquare tips, etc.

Regardless, Google has the the money to spend and the need to spend it: thus far, although touted as a "Groupon Killer" and a "Yelp Killer," Google Offers and Google Places/Google Maps have failed to do just that.

Meanwhile, the occasion of the deal has been excuse to engage in the kind of humor worthy of a Zagat's write-up. As in this mock restaurant review announcing the deal on Zagat.com. Or Ms. Mayer's "Acquisition haiku" via Twitter, "Delightful deal done; Zagat and Google now one; foodies have more fun!"

If a user is logged into iGoogle, there is no log in process. Just select your location and an email pops up in your inbox. Unlike Groupon, it doesn't ask a bunch of questions off the bat, maybe because Google has already crafted a fairly detailed profile on me. The initial email also doesn't contain any offers.

The choices for subscribers so far are limited to Manhattan: uptown, midtown or downtown. "Google really doesn't have the salesforce in place right now to offer a big variety," says Vin Vicanti, of deal aggregator Yipit. "And what makes a deal work is the specificity, something that is close by and fits my taste."

Vicanti says Google does have some advantages it could leverage, such as integration with Gmail and Google Maps. "If you could purchase the deal directly from within the email, and later be able to navigate to it on your phone simply by calling up the email, that could really differentiate Google Offers from competitors."

But for now, says Vacanti, it seems like the Google Offers group won't be able to tap those resources. "My sense is that they are in a  silo of marketing and sales, cut off from engineering. They are going to need to prove themselves first."  If that is the logic Google is operating on, it's a shame, because on its own this product is unlikely to have the personality or momentum of its established competitors.