I had an email this morning announcing that the new Plazes is online, so it looks like all of the features should now be public.
There are just a few things that still bother me – I think if the team could sort these out, they might get a bit more uptake:
- Some of us have been kept up-to-date via email. The Plazes blog has been very quiet on the subject of the whole upgrade. I’m grateful for the alpha/beta exposure, but it seems like more awareness could have been built up around the new version by more coordinated use of blogs, email and other media.
- The Plazer for Windows and Mac has been re-released, but the Mac one in particular has had some problems. It would be nice if these were open sourced, or a better way of reporting issues existed than the comments in the new Mac group.
- The API has changed. I’ve seen inconsistent messages on the blogs or via email that certain parts of the API have been / will be removed before certain dates. The WhereAmI XML-RPC PHP endpoint has certainly been removed, and as a result my little Applescript for ecto is not currently working. The success of Web 2.0 sites is usually a lot to do with their APIs and the ease of use… right now, Plazes could be opening this up a lot more and letting the community play with the new features programmatically. The upcoming Hack Day is a case in point – participants could be making use of APIs offered by Plazes if they were made available.
- [added in a later edit] They seem to have stripped out some of the privacy features. Before, I could choose which of my IM accounts or email addresses to reveal publically or to contacts… this option seems to have gone. An unwelcome regression in function.
I still think Plazes is a cool site, but there’s so much more they could be doing to build their own momentum.
Technorati tags: Plazes, Hack Day, mashups, API, communication, Web 2.0
I agree, the alpha run of plazes seemed very short, and suddenly the alpha site vanished and the old plazes was replaced (replazed?) with the new code.. There are some serious issues with plazer still.. try running a copy on your thinkpad and your mac and see what happens potentially to your plazes/trazers, I was repeatedly bouncing back between Farnborough and Home last week.. Also on the SMS plazer.. why can I add what I’m doing to my message… I still cant merge plazes, and theres no apparent pick up for the trazers on blogs (I’d like to replace twitterings on my blog with trazers) the release seems a bit rushed, and it lacking alot of information WE need.. comeone plazes.. fix it.. you potentially have a great solution we’d love to use, but you’re not telling us what your doing..!!
… and not only that, the only way of reporting issues seems to be via comments in groups or via their Support email 🙁
the plazes flash badge doesnt seem to link back correctly.. all of the previous ‘sharing’ of plazes info on your blog is also gone from the new site… it’s a bit lacking there!!! and I’m still being places in IBM farnborough!!