About a month ago I gave a presentation at Web Monday about Plazes. If you’re unfamiliar with Plazes, it’s a web service which uses a small application on your computer to register the network you are connected to. Information about this network can be stored, this forms a Plaze. For example, right now I’m at the University of Twente Campus Network, which is a huge plaze for every computer directly connected to the university’s network. Effectively, everyone who uses plazes and is connected to the university network will be at this plaze.
Since I gave the presentation, Plazes launched a mobile client. It works by finding the ID of the cell tower your phone is connected to, asks for an address if needed, and gives you a list of plazes in the neighbourhood. Up to you to pick the plaze you are actually at. Even though the promise of connecting to Plazes without using a computer is pretty neat, picking a plaze kinda sucks. And thus, my proposal at Web Monday:
There should be a Plazes client which uses RFID tags to identify the Plaze, and connect automatically.
The way this would work is that you would walk into a house or office, and there would be a sticker on the wall with the Plazes logo. Touch it with your RFID-enabled phone (inspired by the address book desk by Timo Arnall) and you’re good to go. This would also lead to the creation of more plazes, on locations where there might not even have been a computer network in the first place. However, as was quickly pointed out, I believe by Gernot, RFID is still far from ubiquitous, and a better solution would be to identify the plaze by a barcode. The hardware (a camera) and software for this is available today. The Plazes APIs support it as well (although not directly).
All there’s left to do is actually implement it.
Yes, I know, I should implement it myself. However, my phone doesn’t even have a camera, nor a data contract to actually talk to Plazes. Don’t really need it, either. (You could, of course, consider this a hint. Could.)
Plazes is feeling stagnant lately. I love the service but its lack of casual use cases is not very conducive for take up. Most of my friends do not carry their laptops around everywhere (i.e. they are normal people). The mobile client also has drawbacks: phone type, data rates.
Somewhere in the same space I think Twitter is pretty funny but I don’t know how its costs are going to work out yet.
Since all the mobile plazer does is send a code to the server and you pay for your data connection per kilobyte the costs for updating your location should be quite minimal. The client is not available for my phone yet so i have had no chance to test this out myself but as soon as it is i’ll try and see how many kb is sent in the process.
Imity is doing this, but with Bluetooth.
/n