Plazes is an the first (?) international location-aware social network and has already been around since 2004. I didn’t come along the term for a long time but back in those days this has been called MoSoSo (= Mobile Social Software). You can discover “Plazes” anywhere in the world, share your location, hook up with your mates or other people in your vicinity and all the usual social networking features such as groups, messaging and commenting are included as well.
The venture has been founded in 2005 by Felix Petersen and Stefan Kellner in Berlin, Germany. By 2006 Plazes had secured seed financing from business angels such as Esther Dyson, Marc Andreessen and Martin Varsavsky. In 2007 Plazes raised €2.7 Million from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures in another round of funding.
Plazes originally started to map a user’s location based on the MAC address of the wireless network that was being used. New routers were discovered by users and tagged with geo-coordinates. After having downloaded a “Plazer” your notebook was capable of detecting your current location by investigating the network you were using.
Nowadays there are plenty of different locations, which are not tied to wireless networks anymore, in the system. The tracking no longer relies on wireless networks. A user can submit his location by SMS, the website or an updated version of the “Plazer”. The new activity concept adds a Twittery Twist to Plazes so that I can describe what I am doing when broadcasting my whereabouts to the world. The latest version is also preserving a user’s update history and allows planning meetings in the future. Recently a new API has been released to enable developers to build their own applications and to extend the reach of the Plazes network.
Even though Plazes is based in Germany its majority of users is from the United States. Many similar location-aware services like Loopt, Helio or Dodgeball (still alive?) exist and similarities between Plazes and websites like Twitter and Jaiku are evident.
To gain more users the challenge for Plazes will be to distinguish itself from comparable services. Opening the system with a new API is definitely a step in the right direction. It will be interesting to watch the fight between the mobile social networks and how Plazes evolves in the future. I will keep an eye on them and inform you about any interesting updates.
Are you using Plazes? What do you think should Plazes do?
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