Tag: plazes

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Kilroy black edited

Social geolocation services over the years have been very useful for me. The value is in triggering serendipitous meetings: being in a city outside my normal patterns at the same time someone in (or peripheral to) my network is in the city too, outside their normal patterns. It happened infrequently, about once a year, but frequently enough to be useful and keep checking in. I was a heavy user of Plazes and Dopplr, both long since disappeared. As with other social platforms I and my data quickly became the marketable product, instead of the customer. So ultimately I stopped using Foursquare/Swarm much, only occasionally for international travel, and completely in 2016. Yet I still long for that serendipitous effect, so I am looking to make my location and/or travel plans available, for selected readers, through this site.

There are basically three ways in which I could do that.
1) The POSSE way. I post my location or travel plan on this blog, and it gets shared to platforms like Foursquare, and through RSS. I would need to be able to show these postings only to my followers/ readers, and have a password protected RSS feed and subscription workflow.
2) The PESOS way. I use an existing platform to create my check-ins, like Foursquare, and share that back to my blog. Where it is only accessible for followers/readers, and has a password protected rss feed.
3) The ‘just my’ way. I use only my blog to create check-ins and share them selectively with followers and readers, and have a password protected rss feed for it.

Option 3 is the one that provides the most control over my data, but likely limits the way in which I can allow others to follow me, and needs a flexible on-the-go way to add check-ins through mobile.
Option 2 is the one that comes with easy mobile apps, allows followers to use their own platform apps to do so, as well as through my site.
Option 1 is the one that is in between those two. It has the problems of option 3, but still allows others to use their own platforms like in option 2.

I decided to try and do both Option 2, and Option 3. If I can find a way to make Option 3 work well, getting to Option 1 is an extension of it.
Option 2 at first glance was the easiest to create. This because Aaron Parecki already created ‘Own Your Swarm‘ (OYS) which is a bridge between my existing Foursquare/Swarm account and Micropub, an open protocol for which my site has an endpoint. It means I can let OYS talk both to my Swarm account and my site, so that it posts something to this blog every time I check-in in Swarm on my mobile. OYS not just posts the check-ins but also keeps an eye on my Swarm check-ins, so that when there are comments or likes, they too get reflected to my blog.

My blog uses the Posts Kinds plugin, that has a posting type for check-ins, so they get their own presentation in the blog. OYS allows me to automatically tag what it posts, which gets matched to the existing categories and tags in my blog.

I from now on use a separate category for location related postings, called plazes. Plazes was the original geolocation app I started using in 2004, when co-founder Felix Petersen showed it to me on the very first BlogWalk I co-organised in the Netherlands. Plazes also was the first app to quickly show me the value of creating serendipitous meetings. So as an expression of geo-serendipic (serendipity-epic?) nostalgia, I named the postings category after it.

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Last Thursday Facebook announced a major step in their growth strategy. It is now possible for others (both companies and Facebook-users) to build so-called applications that can be integrated in your Facebook profile. this is way more than just making widgets possible. Facebook now gives API access to their core functionality, like replacing their well used own photo-functionality with your own.
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Twitter in Facebook
Immediately a wave of applications has become available. Some like Twitter, in cooperation between Facebook and the third party, others like Flickr, are made by some student with a Facebook profile.
I added applications for Last.fm, Flickr, my presence in other YASNs, Twitter, Radar and one for developers. I hope for the quick availability of apps for Plazes, Jaiku and Skype.
I think this step is interesting in a couple of ways. First the degree of openness (where MySpaces clumsy handling of widgets pales in comparison), but also for platforms that position themselves as ‘ open’ such as PeopleAggregator and Ning where you can start your own network, this is good news.
I see this as a sign that openness and the ability to migrate your network across platforms now can become part of the competing elements in the YASN field. If you love somebody, set them free, now stands a change to become true for YASNs a bit more. Keeping your customers by acknowledging they do not want to be imprisoned by your product.
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Flickr and the YASN application
Compare this to the weird strategy Ecademy had, making their free functionality next to useless, and making it impossible to even delete your account.
I think Facebook made a great step, that also brings value to the student communities that made Facebook big. With that the criticism Facebook reaped when opening up to all last September, amongst others from Danah Boyd, that opening Facebook would mean the end is answered too. Also for the ‘ab origine’ community in Facebook new value has been added.
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Apps you add are also mentioned to your contacts, making quick adoption of apps possible.

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Last week at an so-called executive update for a big publishing company I talked about YASNs in the context of communities and networks.

How YASNs are walled gardens.
How they often are positioning themselves as the ‘only’ channel of communication.
No export, no migrating your content, let alone your network, to another platform.

And then I heard myself say it:
“They are also separating your real live networks and communities from their digital representation on-line.
That is why it is exciting to see services that allow you to take your digitally represented network with you into the physical world. With tools like Jaiku (and not Twitter!), Plazes and Imity, a bridge is build between your real world interaction and your on-line interaction. Augmenting each other, strengthening each other. They’re mobile clients as well as yasns.”

The death of YASNs.
I’ve said it before, but this time I heard new meaning in my own words. The coin dropped so to speak.
So when PeopleAggregator is an answer to the walled gardens, and maintaining too many profiles…will it also start allowing me to take my network with me to the place where it matters: my physical world movements and face to face interactions? Marc? Paolo?

Or will the Plazes’s Jaiku’s and the Imity’s take yasns to the next stage of evolution?

I now wonder when I will be deleting my profiles at LinkedIn, Xing, Tribe or Hyves and such. On the other hand, I still have a profile at Orkut and Ryze…. 😉

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In Ambient Findability, the author Peter Morville talks about how The Sea of bits is rolling onto the shores of the land of atoms. This to me is at this point one of the most interesting and promising areas of web development, and a logical next step of the direction webapps took with social software. Putting relationships first in your tools makes presence and location awareness suddenly worthwile, where it wasn’t before when the web was filled with information, more a repository and less a meeting place. I have been playing with two applications exploring that interesting new place where the information landscape meets our geographical landscape, using our social landscape as an intermediary. And I am eagerly looking forward to getting my hands on the beta of a third. Those three applications are Plazes, Jaiku and Imity.

Plazes
Plazes is already pretty old in internet terms. I first heard Felix Petersen about his Plazes tool in the spring of 2004, and joined their beta later that year. It allows you to share your geographic location with others, and see who is near you, or where interesting locations are around you. They have been building on the concept continuously. Recently they brought Plazes to your mobile phone, though for a limited number of models. And now SMS-features have been added opening up all mobile phones to Plazes. The mobile features allow for more granular location-resolution (based on cell tower triangulation) and getting information quickly on nearby free hotspots for instance, or contacts present in your area.

Jaiku
Jaiku takes presence a step further than Plazes. Where Plazes focusses on geographic location, and presenting information on net access, contacts, and photos around that, Jaiku aims to generate a continuous presence stream, or ‘chatter’. It takes your different RSS feeds, accepts SMS messages, and blurbs you enter on the site, and combines them into one stream. This allows your contacts to be peripherally aware of what you are up to, and estimate the chance and desireability of meeting up. Perhaps not something to publicly share, but again a good example not of having mobile access to information on the web, but of bringing mobile information to the web around your person. The information you share can of course be accessed by others both on the web, as well as on a mobile client.

In the image above you see examples of delicious bookmarks, a Plazes Traze, an SMS text, a Flickr image and a text blurb entered on the site, being combined into my presence stream.

Imity
Imity is yet another angle on presence awareness. It builds on bluetooth signature detection. It allows for you to see who is in the area, or if a friend perhaps just passed through the same location. I first got a glimpse of Imity during this years Reboot conference (see their presentation), and they are now accepting e-mail addresses of those eager to beta test. The Pocket Radar, as Imity calls it, allows you also to see alerts that someone in your social network platforms (such as Xing, LinkedIn etc.) is near you, enabling chance meetings. It can also be used to ‘log’ who was on an event, and thus build a list of participants for later on-line interaction after the event took place. I am eager to try this out.


(Bluetooth map of Reboot conference rooms, picture uploaded by Pollas.)

Three interesting tools, and worthwile to keep track of their development. You can track them yourselves through their blogs of course: Plazes blog, Jaiku blog, Imity blog.

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When I wrote about the dinner with Marc Canter here some 2 months ago I also mentioned thinking about social software as being composed of different triangles.

The notion stems from how I use Flickr and delicious. I track individuals and their bookmarks and through those two pieces of info I get to know their use of language as well as their general areas of interest for the day. But I also look at how the stuff I bookmark has been tagged by other people. Are these people already familiar to me? Different language use (in the tags) may hint towards different circles of people and communities.

You see that in both cases I don’t really look at the bookmark itself, and I certainly don’t use it as a singular piece of information. It is merely an object around which I look for existing relationships, and scout out possible new ones. An object of sociality that has served its role as soon as I used it to find new people, or connect to already familiar ones.

It works much the same way for Flickr, though the aspect to get a quick glance at what my existing relationships are up to is more important to me here.

In general you could say that both Flickr and delicious work in a triangle: person, picture/bookmark, and tag(s). Or more abstract a person, an object of sociality, and some descriptor. In every triangle there always needs to be a person and an object of sociality. The third point of the triangle is free to define as it were.

This becomes more interesting once you start using the descriptors to move from one object of sociality to the next, or when the descriptor is an object of sociality itself. Now you can hop through different applications while still doing the same thing you previously did inside one application: build connections to people based on their current interest, albeit a picture, a location, an event, a bookmark, a blogpost or a document.

We generally call the stacking of apps like this mash-up. But in this case more importantly it allows us as people to seamlessly wander from one application to another while not being interrupted because you have to consciously migrate from one ‘channel’ to another. It is not mash-up to bring more functionality into one new application based on existing ones, it is mash-up to more closely follow your own routines while building and maintaining relationships.

Plazes for instance puts itself in the place of the tags in Flickr, and presto, now pictures are tied to geographic locations and vice versa. Through which you then can find (new) people again.

To me this also means that self-proclaimed social applications that do not offer you the possibility to explore all sides of a triangle, aren’t useful as a social medium. A bookmarking service that does say how many others bookmarked the same thing, but does not let you explore who these people are or lets you see who uses what tags, only the tags used by themselves, doesn’t do much in a social sense. By maintaining the triangle you make sure that individuals keep their face in the masses even when you aggregate info. (You can always drill back to a person and her personal set of in this case bookmarks and tags)

You can enter any triangle through a single point. This is the most basic use of an application. I store pictures, I bookmark, I write, I geotag. But from that you can start exploring the sides of the triangle, finding new connections to people either based on the object of sociality, or by browsing the descriptors and hopping to the next object of sociality.

Social software I think is social because it puts relationships in the center view, and less the information that flows through these relationships. The possibility of triangulation allows you to also extend and broaden both existing and new relationships into new information domains, and thus increases the likelihood of new networks of relationships and meaning emerging from the background noise.

Photo Value of Triangulation by Roland Tanglao during the Seattle Blogwalk. (CC0 public domain)