Last year spring I met Felix Petersen at the very first BlogWalk meeting and he told me about Plazes, which he created, a service that provides social networking services based on your geographical information. I never had much use for it, except for having a neat location indicator at the frontpage of my blog.
The real fun and power of Plazes became evident yesterday evening/early this morning.
Martin Roell and I were taking a last drink in the lobby of our hotel, when both our Plazes launchers indicated that there was someone else there too.

As there was only wifi in the lobby, we thought the Mac user behind us would be the one. Turned out he wasn’t. I took a look at the profile of ‘reinvented’ and saw that he was Peter from Prince Edward Island. I remembered that Rob Paterson once mentioned him, and also that Rob had asked Dina to meet Peter at Reboot as well in the comments of her blog. So I (and Martin as well, without me knowing) send him a message.

Sure enough a few minutes later Peter entered the lobby. A great, wide ranging, conversation ensued. Turned out Peter had wifi coverage in his room, which was near the lobby.
Without Plazes this conversation would not have taken place, we would have missed out on it by mere metres. So kudos to Felix and Stefan!
Still wondering what is social about social software? I’m not.
Both Peter and Martin blogged it as well.