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One of the more intriguing social net­work­ing applic­a­tions that I have been enjoy­ing over the last year has been Plazes.com. I blogged about my ini­tial exper­i­ences with this spa­tial addi­tion to the social sphere. Plazes uses your cyber­space IP to place you in phys­ical space. If you are at a pre­vi­ously defined Plaze, then you are pin­pointed. If you have dis­covered a new place, you sup­ply some info about the place, refine the loc­a­tion and it is stored for future ref­er­ence. You can dis­cover if there are other plazers in your nearby space or plazes that have been recom­men­ded and you can also get a Traze (a spa­tial and tem­poral indic­a­tion of where you have been over time). You can also use your mobile phone to plaze your­self or to find nearby plazes. The sys­tem works, is a hoot to use and you can even provide a little map to your blog read­ers show­ing where you are in real time –-> see my own side­bar.

Last week, the Plazes folks opened up their final beta test­ing on a new ver­sion that will shortly appear. With the new ver­sion, not only can you identify your plaze to the world, you can also share inform­a­tion about what you are doing there– ala Twit­ter. Addi­tion­ally you can add past plazes to your loc­a­tions and indic­ate where you will be in the future. All of this is accom­plished with little effort on your part and takes the social prom­ise to a new level. The ser­vice is designed for arran­ging meet-ups, indic­at­ing wifi avail­ab­il­ity or a good res­taur­ant amongst a circle of trust. It also feeds the cur­rent fas­cin­a­tion with shar­ing your cur­rent emo­tions, loc­a­tions, thoughts etc. with your friends and the world at large ( eg. Twit­ter, Face­book).

The spa­tial dimen­sion fas­cin­ates me. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a real time mov­ing map plaz­ing your acquaint­ances with respect to your cur­rent plaze (this all pre­sum­ing that you have friends that use Plazes). Ima­gine if you will a scal­able map of your neighbourhood/world in which your friends are all pin­pointed with a small bright object and their name or pic­ture, all mov­ing around like a radar display…oh the pur­suit of omni­science (I guess it’s a mat­ter of time before we all have embed­ded RFID ;-) I like the new Plaze and it opens up some new aven­ues to how I would con­sider bene­fit­ing from Plazes.

Heark­en­ing to Kevin Lynch’s men­tal maps of per­sonal per­cep­tion of space, the abil­ity to use Trazes (past record of where you have been, how long you have been there and what you have been doing) to learn more about your habits and how you arrange your time and define your space. Pri­vacy factors aside and I admit that there are many, Plazes allows for learn­ing as much about your­self as your friends.

ps. Had to also see how effect­ively this little ‘com­pose in Word and post dir­ectly to your blog’ func­tion actu­ally works. Nearly flaw­less as it turns out…just missed the more tag that I inserted…can prob­ably escape that out to make it work.