Tijs and I have just returned from a quick weekend in Berlin, let me write a quick wrapup of the Plazecamp and try to answer the questions I posed before we went.

The day at the Plazes HQ started with a brief explanation of the API (video) and a day of hacking with access to the plazes devs so any problem could be fixed very quickly. Peter Rukavina, Plazes’s advocate, had flown over and he wrote a detailed wrapup of the event.

Plazes — the service

Plazes the service still has the underlying foundations of the geopresence that it started out with those couple of years ago: Plazing yourself based on the MAC address of the connection still works. At a certain point this mechanism proved too limited and they opened it up so anybody could plaze themselves anywhere.

A further consequence of this opening up became that the use case of a plaze was no longer to claim a plaze and show your presence. After the re-launch the focus was put on creating Activities (current or future) and spreading them to your friends. Activities naturally have a location (Plaze) they are associated with. People participating in an activity duplicate it and add it to their own stream of activities.

This is considerably different from what Plazes once was and other sites in presence currently. It looks like Plazes is competing more directly with a site such as Meetup.com than with a site like Twitter.

For presence and some co-ordination, I use Jaiku right now because most people I know are on it, because it has a nice flow, it is simple and serves a need. I don’t know if Plazes would score enough on all those points for me to become a highly active user again.
A lot of people I know are on Plazes because it was an early service providing a lot of fun and some benefits, unfortunately most of them have become mostly inactive on the service.
The flow of Activities is unclear for me and I think overly complicated with the worst problem being the fact that if I participate in an activity, I get a duplicate for myself. I understand why it works like this, but the presentation of it manages to confuse me.

Planned activities create iCal output for easy integration in your calendar (just like Upcoming and Dopplr do), which is reasonable. In a more ideal world I could create the activity directly from my calendar because in most cases that will be the leading source of future activities, not the other way around.

Another feature that would be nice for APIs would be event triggered calls so I could execute a piece of code every time I plaze myself (to update my location in Jaiku, Hyves and associates). But there currently are hardly any scaling web applications that do this properly (hint!).

Geographical browsing was a feature that was very nice in the old Plazes. This allowed you to see people in the area on a map or interesting Plazes in the area on a map. Though actual use was very limited, one very real use case was to find WiFi hotspots in the area.
The activity focus of the new site has pretty much done away with it all. I remember sitting in a hostel in Istanbul and trying to find interesting Plazes in the area which was pretty impossble. Using the API some or most of this functionality should be recreatable.

Mobile applications are of course very much of interest for any location based service, and Plazes’s new API with the arrival of more and more capable devices could combine to create a nice offering.
I have started to build an Android app which would get your friends’ locations and display them on the builtin MapView. This is more a good excuse to try out Android, than to create an actual finished product.

Web application focus is essential given the very many use cases that Plazes potentially provides. They have chosen for Activities as the central focus for the site, but with the API anybody could build another site using the same data fulfilling other needs with different views and interactions.

Technical Details

I spent the day reviving my Plazes maps widget that I had made on the previous Plazes API. That version would have still worked nicely if the API hadn’t changed, the current changes in the API forced me to rewrite it within the constraints of the Apple Dashboard environment.

Because of cross site restrictions, a pure JavaScript approach was no longer feasible. Fortunately Widgets are pretty much unlimited in functionality if you delve into the subject matter. You can write your own Objective-C code and bridge that from JavaScript or as I did, you can execute shell commands. I used that functionality to construct the proper cURL strings as they are given in the API documentation, and call them using the widget.system() call.
Widget.system gives you a lot of power, but the associated callback mechanism is somewhat weird. The resulting JavaScript code turned out to become something of a kludge.

That and the limited debugging facilities of Widget development (I don’t have Dashcode installed yet. I would be interested to hear if development is improved dramatically with that.) and some issues with XML parsing (I was surprised that jQuery does not have a default way of parsing an XML-fragment.) took up quite some time.

I will do some touchup work to the widget and cleanup the resulting code. Then I’ll publish it to the Plazecamp site and a public Mercurial repository for anyone to play with. I think it will serve more as proof of concept code than that it will have an actual real use for now.

Wrapping up

The API is a valuable and essential addition to Plazes which has a lot of very valuable data and an interesting new focus. It remains to be seen how people will use it, but a day’s of hacking at the Plazes HQ was fun and proved that a lot of stuff is possible.

Being back in Berlin is always nice and I’m beginning to feel more and more at home there. There were a lot of nice people at Plazecamp and I also met the people behind Soundcloud which promises to be a very interesting music startup indeed.

After the Saturday, we spent some more time in the city and drove back in a personal record on Sunday evening. Also thanks Katharina for letting Tijs and me crash at her place.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 0:53 and is filed under Plazes, experience, location, presence.