Today was PlazeCamp in Berlin, Germany.
Sadly, I ended up not being able to attend in person, only virtually via IRC mainly. But I was not detered and managed to add something I hope. In any case, I was at least able to create a hack which I am able to share here and on the wiki over at plazecamp.com (
Direct Link ).
It is an idea that Roel came up with at HackdayLondon actually, that being to pull events from upcoming.org (now
http://upcoming.yahoo.com ) based on your location from Plazes.
So, I sat down with the two APIs and came up with
THIS okay technically
this but lets not be fussy. It is not pretty but it works and shows how location can be used. ( available
HERE ) now, I know I have done this in an ugly manner and I invite you to clean up the source. Give me a break I'm a noob and I had about 1/2 an hour to get this done before the kids took over my time. :)
Peter, the primary evangelist, came up with
http://ruk.ca/wii which is a pretty cool step in the direction of a client that is usable on a mobile phone screen. In fact it works great on the larger screen on my E90. Obviously (from the URL) it is designed for when you are accessing via a Nintendo Wii, so the fonts are too big for the smaller (more standard sized) screen on my mobile.
SvenG was pretty active for a while on the IRC channel and also took some notes at
http://www.guckes.net/plazes/ which are interesting reading as he is a new Plazes user.
On the channel I mentioned some ideas I had, basically similar to the ideas I've blogged about and Dirk (over at
www.NoseRub.com ) has been thinking about. I am still looking for context in plazes/twitter/facebook/noserub/etc. I think location can be key to your context, I'd like to be able to filter what groups of people I know see about me, based on the context I produce that content. EG If I am at work, my work contacts should see my tweets, etc. When at home I want friends and family to see my tweets. My family don't want to see my work tweets and I don't want my work colleagues seeing my personal tweets.
Perhaps a great pairing of German technologies would be noserub & plazes.
I know NoseRub is working towards filtering data and Plazes could be a way to add that contextual data. It is better than pure geo data (GPS) perhaps, as (like today) I was able to set my Plaze location to Plazes HQ, whereas a pure GEO location system would have had me at home. I used Plazes to define in a way where my focus was. The comments I added to my plaze status/activity used wors like "attending PlazeCamp - Virtually" so people could tell (if the looked) that I was notreally there.
My gripe with Plazes, if I have to have one; is that it is becoming IMHO a bit of a twitter clone. The PLAZE has lost some priority and activity is becoming more important. Maybe I am old, but I preferred it when it was more about the Plaze. I also think that becoming too like twitter might be a bad plan for Plazes as it puts themin there with Jaiku and Twitter and all the other "micro-blogging" services.
I'd prefer it in many ways if plazes became a twitter client? why not?
Then when I used the plazer I'd be posting to twitter (i have more contacts thre anyway) but perhaps plazes could do come of what I have written above. Maybe at some locations the activities (I likes the term Trazes by the way guys!) would go to Twitter maybe in others I might choose that they go to Jaiku or similar. Maybe to... SMS to a group. Maybe to a email mailing list/address? Maybe direct to my status on Facebook? The possibilities are pretty huge.
It will be interesting to see where Plazes goes after PlazeCamp, Yahoo FireBird will be interesting, as from what I have read it is direct competition.
Lance
p.s. Anyone able to answer the question "How do most people access Plazes? Via a plazer? Via SMS? Via the WWW site? Other?"
p.p.s I hate the SMS service. No actually I think it works really well. Obviously well built. I just hate that it costs me 12p a pop, especially as I have a wifi phone and also GPRS on a (almost) flat tariff. A proper mobile interface would be a good project guys!