Plazes

From http://plazes.com/ : "Plazes puts physical presence to the web. Plazes automatically detects your location and connects you to things nearby. See people in your area, discover other Plazes nearby and keep an eye on the whereabouts of your friends."

You install a small client on your machine. Whenever you are connected via wireless or wire, the system known and records your location. If a location (such as a coffee shop) is not known in the database, the user can enter the address. That is, the location database is maintained by the users. Technically speaking, Plazes uses the mac address of the default gateway to identify a location. Apparently there is also software for cell phones.

Uses:

• List online buddies where they are
• Add your current location to your website and blog
• Add your current location to applications, such as Skype, Google Earth, AIM

FAQ: http://plazes.com/info/faq/

Examples:

• http://beta.plazes.com/user/stefankellner - current and previous locations of co-founder Stefan Kellner
• http://beta.plazes.com/user/JoiIto/ - Joi Ito is travelling a lot, click on the "My paces" tab, you see "average travel speed is 1123 km/day"
• http://ross.typepad.com/ - location indicator in Ross Mayfield's blog (in left sidebar)

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny

Discussion

I met the two founders of Plazes yesterday at the first WebMonday event in Mountain View, CA, where they gave a demo on this web application. Cool stuff.

I was considering doing something similar for TWiki at my previous workplace based on the IP address of the users. In a midsize to large company, employees travel a lot to other sites. It is useful to find out who is currently in town.

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Jun 2006

I prefer to stay current with new technology and share it with the TWikiCommunity. TWiki (and community) might fall behind if we do not leap forward.

Large companies could use a WhereIsPlugin (discussed at WhereIsPluginDev) that learns about places and shows if a user is currently online and where, such as:

• Online in London office
• Online in home office
• Offline, last seen 14 hours ago in New York office

The included header topic in every user homepage could have a %WHEREIS{%TOPIC%}% that gets expanded to the location information.

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Jun 2006

This seems like a good idea. My company, for one, can use such a tool

-- RafaelAlvarez - 15 Jun 2006

Just a quick note: On a microscale, http://dutchpipe.org/ does something similar to this.

When you are visiting their site, you (your avatar :-)) are somewhere at the site: You can find out who is online, where other people are located and so on. You can talk to them / talk to the whole site / etc ..

So by entering a standard website, at the same time you can choose to take part in a "realtime" universe during your stay. Kind of like a mix up between MUD/IRC/Avatars/Objects/Webpages/Interactivity .. perhaps this will inspire something interesting just suddenly

It's an MIT license, can be applied to any static HTML / other site pretty easily (add a bit of javascript to each page). Perhaps an idea for a plugin once, grabbing userinfo from TWiki / possibly add option to save otherwise transient discussion in a coffeebreak-style area or similar.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 19 Jun 2006

A per topic presence of users is a neat idea. This adds synchronous features to the asynchronou nature of wikis.

-- PeterThoeny - 20 Jun 2006