Plazes Survey Results
For a university project we researched location-based services and how they can improve social interaction. As part of the research we conducted a survey under 23 Plazes users, all contacts of mine. The results are from March 12th, 2007.
In short, Plazes is a web service which tracks the location of their users via software applications those users run on their machines, a mobile phone application and SMS “check-ins”. A location is called a Plaze, a location history a Traze. The software application uses the identity of the network router as an identifier for the Plaze.
Here are the questions asked and the results.
Plazes: Freed from the Network
About a month ago I gave a presentation at Web Monday about Plazes. I proposed that there should be a Plazes client which uses RFID tags to identify the Plaze, and connect automatically.
Reviewing the Plazes APIs
Plazes is an extremely cool location awareness service. Recently the first version of the Plazes API was released. Together with the Launcher and WhereAmI APIs there now are three public APIs for the service. As a hobby project I’ve updated the RubyForPlazes project, run by Peter Rukavina, to work with the new API. The new version hasn’t officially been announced yet, as there is still some work to do with regards to testing and examples, but it is already in the repository at Peter’s site. During the development of the new Ruby implementation I’ve run across a number of issues with the API design, which are documented in this article.
