Yesterday, two postings on the Plazes blog, and another on Christian Heindel’s blog, alerted me to the fact that Plazes was going to get an upgrade.
The new version is now out there, and I like it. It is nicely integrated with Google Maps, with map markers showing known Plazes near you. The profile has been extended to support more information. Overall, it is a good clean interface. The one thing I find slightly annoying is that I now have to scroll down the dashboard page to see my contacts.
(also, I’m finding that now that I’m “Plazeless” – because I’m on on dialup right now – the website seems to be behaving very oddly, but maybe that is a temporary issue… things like the Smartlists don’t seem to be operating, and the maps are not showing)
I’m quite amused by the fact that unlike Flickr (which recently went from Beta to Gamma), Plazes is proudly “still beta”.
A couple of other points… the Plazes API now has its own blog and wiki… and the Java interface was recently extended to cover more of the Plazes API. The mailing list for the API has just started to get a bit more traffic, too.
If you’re not using Plazes yet, take a look. Maybe you can catch up with Ed Brill, who has discovered far more Plazes than I ever hope to…
Update: looks like the website issues are somehow related to a combination of a 3G mobile connection plus Firefox 1.5, it works in IE… 🙁
Hi Andy!
Do the “plazless” problems persist? Please contact me 🙂
Stefan
Stefan, thanks, I e-mailed you. Looks like it is Firefox, possibly in combination with my 3G connection…
[…] As I am starting to get ready (Leaving tomorrow morning) for the US trip to attend IBM’s Collaboration Best Practices, to be held in Somers, I just noticed over at Andy Piper’s weblog that there is a new version of Plazes, although the Plazer seems to be the same still version. If you would remember, I have been talking about it over here in elsua a couple of times already. In fact, I am still using it as you would be able to notice on my weblog template, on the left column. And I am quite enjoying it, specially since it gives me a good chance to let folks know where I am at any given point in time, that is my physical location, or it would also let me know where folks that I normally follow are at that point in time. Quite powerful application specially for providing that online presence indicator for people who may be on the road quite regularly or who get to work from different places over an extended period of time. Thus, of course, I had to check what was new in this latest upgrade. […]
[…] Hot on the heels of last week’s Plazes upgrade, the Windows version of Plazer has been updated. Plazer is a small application that runs on your system and tries to figure out where in the world you are located, based on your network connection (I say it tries to do this – it doesn’t work with a dialup or 3G connection, but broadband is fine). It is not spyware and it doesn’t get in the way of what you are doing on your PC, it just hooks you in to all the location information that Plazes knows about. […]