Plazes is a grassroot approach to location-aware interaction, using the local network you are connected to as location reference. Plazes allows you to share you location with the people you know and to discover people and plazes around you. It's the navigation system for your social life and it's absolutely free. :


This is Plazes:
Plazes is a grassroot approach to location-aware interaction, using the local network you are connected to as location reference. Plazes allows you to share you location with the people you know and to discover people and plazes around you. It's the navigation system for your social life and it's absolutely free.
Plaze = Location + Context:
A Plaze is a physical location with a local network - private or public, wired or unwired. A Plaze constitutes of the information about the actual location like pictures, comments and mapping information, as well as the people currently online at that Plaze.
What you can use Plazes for:
Share your location
Provide more context to the people you know by easily sharing your current and past whereabouts. It's easy and you can even integrate your location into your blog or your instant messenger.
Discover People and Plazes
Discover Plazes like hotspots, restaurants or offices in your vicinity or hook up to people close by. Follow your friends with our People Radar or the Trazes function.
Location enable your life
With Plazes you can automagically geotag your pictures or your blog posts, enriching the things you create with location. You can even build your own things location enabled, using our API.
How it works in a nutshell:
Log on to a network
You need to be online to use Plazes. The system uses a fingerprint of the network you are logged onto as a unique identifier for a specific Plaze. The key is being connected with the geographic location of your network (i.e. your Plaze) on our server.
Use the launcher
This process is being handled automatically by a small program you install on your PC, Macintosh or Linux box, called the launcher. Once the launcher knows where you are, it opens the corresponding page for your current Plaze in your webbrowser.
Annotate a Plaze
If your current Plaze is not yet in the Plazes database you are being asked to provide a name and a geographic location (i.e. an adress) for this new Plaze. You can also annotate this Plaze virtually by adding pictures or comments. More information can be later added by you or anyone else physically present at this Plaze.
Plazes and Privacy
We at Plazes are very aware of the privacy issues being raised by any kind of location aware service. But in contrast to services detecting your location via your mobile phone or a gps bug, you are ALWAYS in charge. Which means in more detail:
Pseudonymity
When joining Plazes, you choose whatever pseudonym you whish. The only mandatory information is that nickname and a valid email adress. No one will ever know your real name if you don't choose to. Unlike your mobile provider we don't need a contract or anything legally binding.
Invisibility
You can choose to use the system in stealth mode. No one, not even your friends, will be able to see you or your current location.
Plazelessness
You can use Plazes without the launcher, meaning you are visible, but your location is unknown. All features, obviously except the location aware searches, will still be available to you.
Tracing
By default we don't record your traces. The moment you leave a plaze that information is gone. You past whereabouts cannot be compromised, since we don't have them. Nevertheless we do provide a function called Trazes, where you can record your past wherebouts and publishing them to other users, if you explicitely wish to do so.
We don't sell data, ever
Plazes will never at any point sell your information, like email address, to third parties.
No Spyware
All the launcher does, is to send a hash containing your router's mac adress, your user name and your encrypted passphrase to the Plazes server. All this information could potentially be used for from our side is to figure out what modell your router is. If you don't believe us, conduct a tcp dump to see, what the Launcher is sending home. There is a debugging mode, if the launcher is not able to identify your network. In that case you are being asked to send an error report containing your routing table, your internal ip adress, your gateway's ip adress and the arp record. You can choose to not send the report.
Data contribution and collaborative quality control
Plazes is a huge collaborative effort for annotating locations. Plazes does not incorporate any kind of centralised editorial staff. All the information is contributed by you, the user. We try to keep the mandatory information for a newly discovered Plaze as little as possible, to advocate the easy discovery of new Plazes and keep hurdles low. Anyone physically present at a location can incrementally complement or alter the information for this plaze. Therefore the quality of data will increase with the number of users and frequency of usage. The most frequented Plazes will therefore have the best quality of information, because it is being reviewed most often.We do not censor pictures and comments. The description page for a plaze is basically a wiki. We believe in free speech and we strongly believe in you, the user. If someone is altering the information in a stupid or malicious way, we are sure someone else will correct it. There is one exception to that rule: The laws of some countries require us to delete unlawful pictures or writing, if explicitely pointed out to us. We will obey these laws, because we don't like being in jail. Consult our Terms of Use. for a detailed list of what constitutes "unlawful". We will also, after giving you a warning, delete your account if you keep fooling around.
The fame and the riches
Your mark
Why should you contribute? Plazes incorporates a system called 'Discoverer'. On every Plaze's description Plaze there is a box called 'Discoverer'. If you discovered a Plaze first, this box is yours. In contrast to the other information on that page, this space can only be edited by you and yourself. You can point to your own weblog or use this space to promote your own business. Solely up to you and your imagination. Neat, isn't it?
Your Karma
For your karmawhores out there we also have a Karma system in place, that grants you one point each for a discovered Plaze or a successfull invitation of a friend of your's. Right now all you earn is a higher rank in our top user list, but who knows what's going to happen in the future...
Your Trazes
And for all you people with the "Off to..." posts on your blogs. Now you can record your Trazes and have them neatly drawn on a world map. Keep braging!
Virtual archeology
Another issue in matters of data quality is obsolete Plazes. The unique identifier for a Plaze is the network, or to be more precise the router's mac adress. In other words, if you buy a new router for your Plaze or move the same router to a different Plaze, the information is either lost or incorrect. Let's say you move into a new appartment and take your router with you. Easy you say, next time you log onto Plazes you just change you adress information. Right, but what about those pictures of your old house, the comments for that party you threw last year, etc? Even worse, stay in your appartment and buy a new router. All your precious information will be gone, the history of your Plaze will be unwritten, forever lost.This whole subject is a tough one. At first we thought the solution was going to be that you can just assign a plaze a new router. But this would either open all doors for a new sport called "Plaze-jacking" or an actual human would have to decide for every Plaze if the transition is legit. Not an option. So we came up with something called a "Historic Plaze". A historic Plaze is an inactive Plaze at the same location. There is two ways for a Plaze to become historic: The discoverer can mark it historic, for instance if he moves out of his flat. This way, if the router pops up the next time it is being assigned a new Plaze.If a Plaze is inactive for more than half a year and there is another Plaze with a similar description at the same location.Historic Plazes are linked to the active Plaze's description page so you can dig down into the Plaze's history. It's virtual archeology.
Plazes and social software
We like to consider Plazes next generation social software. Obviously, any kind of interaction system involving people is social software. Lately the term has been coined towards 'six-degrees-of-separation' software like friendster or orkut. Plazes takes it to the next level regarding location-awareness and impliciteness. The Plazes you are frequenting are actually a much better filtering system and common denominator than explicit connections like "he is my friend". By being virtually present at certain Plazes like a record label or a certain restaurant and having conversations via comments at that Plaze, the system is much closer to how we actually interact in the real world. By being able to annotate real world locations virtually, Plazes augments, enhances and encourages real-world communication rather than simulating it. Nevertheless, Plazes does allows you to declare other users as friends. This simply means that you trust the person in regard of your personal information. Plazes allows you to specify for every bit of profile information wether it's visible only to your friends or to everybody. Unlike with friendster and the likes, you cannot see who your friend's friends are.
Plazes embraces other services that deliver additional contect. You can simply link to your other digital identities from your Plazes profile.
Plazes is open
Plazes provides an API that lets third party developers create Plazes-enabled, and therefore location-enabled, applications. Using our "Where-am-I" API applications have already been developed integrating Plazes in Instant Messengers, Blog Software or even with picture sharing services like flickr. Possibilities are huge. If you are interested in using the Plazes API we will provide you with the necessary documentation and the developer key. As of now the Plazes API is for non-commercial use and we can change itself or the terms of use at any time.