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.
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A while back I was contacted by Felix Petersen from Plazes.com, one of my favorite tools to find wifi access. They were looking for “London City Captains”, people who were interested to represent Plazes in London. I really don’t know London that well yet, so I had to decline but if you think you can handle the job, then contact me and I will forward your details.

In the whole email conversation I did manage to get invited into the private Beta group of the next Plazes release and today I received an email from Felix with link to their private Beta. It looks really cool (screenshots on my Flickr page) and they are trying to integrate a sort of Twitter/Jaiku omnipresence into their next desktop client. So next to knowing where someone is you will be able to know what they are doing. They might just better have teamed up with Jaiku maybe.

A new feature is to let people know where you are going to be in the future, a sort of combination between places and Upcoming. Maybe (again) it would have been a better idea to actually team-up with Upcoming or Meetup to fetch this data automatically. I do like their new groups feature and I think we will be seeing a totally new and improved version of Plazes soon.

All and all I think they really took Plazes to the next level. More details might be coming as I keep playing around.