Plazes – Location Awareness Meets Social Software at Your Service
(Migrated weblog post from LSR)
Through a work colleague of mine I have been checking out lately one interesting free offering that gives a true new meaning to the expression Location Awareness. It is called Plazes and if you are into social / groupware software then you must take a look into it because it puts together some really interesting concepts. First interesting option is that Plazes uses the local network you are connected to as your location reference. Then you can share that location with other folks you may know or get to know about some other people and expand on your virtual network, not only from locations next to yours but all over the place.
At the same time that it puts together that location awareness option it has got a lovely integration with already existing tools like Skype, Flickr, Google Maps and Multimap. So as you can see there are multiple layers you can use in order to stay connected with other folks.
It will even allow you to find out if there may be other folks closer to you based on your location, so you can find Plazes within 2, 5, 25 or 50 KMs., which is ideal if you are new to a particular place and would like to meet up some other people. And before you do that you may get a chance to find out some more about them with Plazes. I guess here in Spain it will still have to pick up a bit because if you perform a search over there it would only come up with a handful of people and not very close to my location, to say the least.
Finally, one other key interesting factor that could make Plazes pretty popular in a very short time is the fact that it allows you to discover Plazes on your own. This means that if you are a regular traveller you get to discover different places that you can add to your profile. Or, even better, you can perform searches looking for specific places based on the Kind of Plaze query. Say, for instance, you are travelling to the UK and would want to find out if there are any WiFi zones available free of charge, then you can get Plazes to fire up a search, look for the criteria and right away you find out that there are six different locations that match that criteria (Just checked).
Overall, I like it quite a lot. It is certainly a very innovative way of putting together all sorts of different social networking tools along with the location awareness feature, that not many offerings have got at the moment. And all that as a free offering. Really nice ! There are some more options and features to explore but you will get to see those in the elsua template over the next few days. For the time being go and get your Plaze and hope to see you there !
[...] About : Contact : Thursday, Oct 20th – 11:10am « Plazes – Location Awareness Meets Social Software at Your Service [...]
[...] And lucky enough for us there are options and different tools out there that could contribute in providing to the community that location awareness aspect, as well as the presence awareness one through IM. Cases like Plazes and Meetro are good examples for that kind of functionality. I am personally using both and I find it quite important and enlightening to be able to see if my colleagues are online or not and if they are, where they are. After all, it is all down to make you feel as if you are talking to and interacting with them face to face, wherever that may be. And we all know how powerful that can be. This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2005 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Collaboration, Communities, Learning and Knowledge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [...]
[...] Thus Meetro actually introduces something that hardly anybody has looked into: location awareness for the remote workers so that they could get very much connected and hardly ever had that sense that they may be alone. Something, in concept, very similar to what Plazes does, except that perhaps, Meetro improves that real-time flavour just a bit more. There are many other good reasons to perhaps give a try to this particular tool (Maybe I will detail in an upcoming weblog post what my favourites would be), but one thing for sure, if you are looking for a real-time collaboration tool where location awareness is an important item to consider for your mobile workforce I doubt there would be a much better tool than Meetro. If not give it a try yourself and see what you think. In an upcoming weblog post I shall detail what my experience has been with it the last week or so that I have been trying it out since last time I weblogged about it. To say the least, worth while the wait, for sure ! [...]
[...] But then, I got sucked in. I downloaded a Windows launcher (the .NET launcher from Christian Heindel) and started to use the site to find out who and what was around me. I found connections to Flickr profiles, and started to make a few new contacts. While I was updating my blog this weekend, I also updated my Plazes profile to point at my new site. It turned out that Luis was using Plazes (I'd actually known this for ages, but didn't get around to pinging him on the subject since I wasn't using it). It also now turns out that Ed Brill is using it – see his illuminating blog post on the subject of Plazes and location-awareness. [...]