I came across this Plazes on Pasta and Vinegar. It claims to be
the first global location-aware service, connecting you with the people and Plazces [sic] in your area and all over the world. It’s basically nothing short of being the navigation system for your social life.
It seems interesting, but to be honest, it doesn’t do itself any favours in explaining itself. Why is it that people don’t realise that copy writing is a craft, not something that can be knocked out by a programmer in their coffee break?
But what I think it does is:
1. You log on to your PC via your network (public, private, whatever).
2. You log the geographic location of that network on the Plazes website.
3. You can use the Plazes website to find other networks.
4. You can use Plazes to find other people in the vicinity – friends, friends of friends (FOAF’s) or make new friends nearby.
5. You can add Tags (eg photo’s) to the network on a virtual basis, that others can discover.
At least, that’s what I made of this:
It does not rely on any mobile phones or GPS. Instead you run a little application called the Plazes Launcher on your computer. It identifies the network you’re in. So for Plazes you are where you are connected. After starting the launcher, your browser pops up and provides you with information like geo-location, links, photos, etc. for this specific network i.e. Plaze. By being at a specific Plaze users also publish presence information to others at the same Plaze and their friends anywhere else. Every user has a personal profile so discovery and search is easy.
I don’t think that I’m being unfair over the copy writing 🙂 I realise that the author may not speak English as a first language. In which case, please get someone to look at it who is a native English speaker and who has some copy writing experience. It would be a shame to see an interesting idea fail just on a simple point of execution like this.
But on a wider point, this business model suffers from Baker Street Syndrome – Baker Street was the first tube station on the London Underground. This means that…..you had nowhere to go to. The trouble with the Plazes model is that if you’re one of the first users and you look for friends (hell, anyone!) in the area and there aren’t any, you’ll eventually lose interest.
So Plazes’ challenge (apart from copy writing) is to get a lot of users very quickly. And that’s not easy.
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