Plazes Mobile Beta
I've been testing Plazes Mobile Beta for about a week. If you don't know it already, Plazes is the popular social networking tool that, as their FAQ explains, "adds physical presence to the web. The Plazes website automatically detects your location and connects you to people and places nearby. See people in your area, discover other locations and follow the whereabouts of your friends." Well, now it's going mobile.
One big advantage Plazes Mobile has over competing MoSoSo apps is that it ties in with the computer-based version of Plazes as well, meaning that my buddies don't have to be mobile themselves for me to keep track of them. Jim's in the office? I can ping him about work. He's at home? I can give him a call about meeting for a beer on Friday. He's in the pub round the corner? We can have that beer now. This is presence taken to the next level.
Of course, like any such service, its usefulness depends on the size of your buddy list, or at least on making sure that the key people you might want to contact are also signed up, but tying in with Plazes on the PC (or Mac, Linux or even UNIX) is a big plus in this respect.
Where's all this going, anyway? One useful feature that occurs to me could be to let you associate information about the place in which you find yourself to the appropriate cell ID, so that it can then be read by people who subsequently connect in the same place - "X is the most over-priced, over-rated restaurant it has ever been my misfortune to eat at", "Guess which famous person lives here ...", "You can get some real bargains at Y if you're willing to haggle" and the like. Indeed, this kind of thing very much ties in with what Russell was talking about recently at MobHappy in Real World Wiki gets closer.
Of the top of my head, and without making any claims of originality, some other enhancements could also be the ability to restrict who can read your tags, so you can leave private messages for your buddies, and to make your tags time-bound, allowing you to advertise specific events without polluting the cell forever.
But all in all, Plazes Mobile Beta is off to a great start.
Comments
Digging around, I found Cellspotting, a collaborative location-based service developed by Carl Johan Ferner. It's existed for about 3 years. It works only with certain Symbian phones, apparently because, according to Carl, "cell information is not available using the Current Java Apis". So I guess I should blame phone manufacturers along with the telcos.
Oh. I see you've used their service, Stuart! And blogged about it over 2 years ago. But I guess we'll just have to wait a bit more until this kind of service becomes useful and generalized.
Kai Carver | 12:26 , 4 2006
Oh, ok, closed beta, Symbian, ... (shrug) Not for me, clearly.
I'm still looking for a way to know where I am and what's around me with my phone.
There's been talk about location-based functionality for years. There's a few offerings in the UK, but not much in France*
This isn't rocket science. What's holding it up? The telcos, I suppose.
*Allocine tantalizingly says: "Avec la géocalisation, trouver la salle la plus proche de chez vous en un instant !!" But this seems to involve buying a lot of ringtones from Vodaphone or something. Yecch.
Every time I enter that portal (usually by mistake, by clicking the wrong key, deviously designed to trip me up), I get confused, baffled, disgusted, then frantically turn off my phone and feel the urge to manically scrub it clean.
Kai Carver | 11:50 , 4 2006
i've been using plazes for a while and the fact that they've bothered to build a mac client as well as windows impressed me - they're clearly prepared to invest in the desktop platform.
but their decision to base their mobile client on Symbian only is disappointing. Symbian's a relatively easy mobile platform to develop for, but the track-record for other Symbian-only apps indicate that they don't persuade people to upgrade to a Symbian phone, and that the % of Symbian handset buyers who only use it to make calls is about the same as the % on other handset platforms. All that adds up to a very small market for the Plazes Mobile app.
The issue probably facing the Plazes team now is the issue facing many other web 2.0 companies when they consider adding mobility to their web platform - do we quadruple our devteam to be able to support multiple handset-specific implementations of MIDP1/2, plus BREW, Windows Mobile and PalmOS?
As I'm not in on the Plazes Mobile beta I don't know the whole feature set, but assuming it does basically what the Mac client does, then there is another way: <self-promotion>www.bluepulse.com
There are already basic mapping widgets and some quite sophisticated location-aware widgets built using the free bluepulse platform. And they run on multiple mobile OSes.</self-promotion>
alan jones | 10:19 , 1 2006
for more on plazes mobile also check out http://www.mopocket.com/2006/05/mobile_plazes_goes_beta.php
Some screen shots as well.
justin oberman | 09:05 , 31 2006
Kai, Plazes does locate you from your phone, but it's based on the nearest cell tower, which I guess would mean that it is quite accurate in cities (not GPS-accurate though) and slightly less so once you're out of the main urban centres.
Iain, you'll be pleased to know that this is something you have to activate yourself each time. This is to keep data costs down (although the amount of data they send is deliberately kept as low as possible anyway) but it also means sneaky people like you and me can still nip off to the pub without broadcasting the information to all and sundry.
Stuart | 10:07 , 30 2006
well, that puts a kaibosh on sneaking to the pub for a quick pint, everyone will see where you are.
iain | 10:10 , 30 2006
Can Plazes somehow detect where I am from my phone, like some service I heard about in the UK? That would be very cool indeed.
Sorry, I haven't clicked the link yet. I checked Plazes a while ago and didn't get it. Plus, it has an annoying name. Like, Pleez!
But I'd definitely be all over it if it gave me location info without needing a GPS, particularly since my GPS doesn't really work in a city like Paris.
Kai Carver | 07:19 , 30 2006