reboot podcast #10: meet the plazes guys
In this episode I talk to Stefan and Felix, the founders of plazes, the location based service.
Download podcast (8.3 MB / 14:18 min)
What is plazes? From the about page:
Plazes is a grassroot approach to location-aware interaction, using the local network you are connected to as location reference. Plazes allows you to share you location with the people you know and to discover people and plazes around you. It’s the navigation system for your social life and it’s absolutely free.
Just yesterday, the 6000th plaze was discovered and at this moment it is already +73. :)
Some links:
- visit the website
- read the plazes blog
- meet the plazes guys: Felix Petersen and Stefan Kellner
- listen to their (incomplete) presentation at reboot
- Peter from Canada has made some additions and postings about plazes in his plazes postings
- of course, I have been a plazes user for nearly a year now ;o) (my profile, needs login)
Now if anyone could make a nice plugin for Skype, that would be great ;))
Tag(s): Plazes, reboot, reboot7, reboot7audio
Tags: european view, reboot
Nicole, dont waste your time hunting for Wifi Networks in your City. Most of them are connected with DSL and Plazes will not be able to handle them.
I had to enter my plaze so often, and plazes does not allow me to merge multiple discoveries, it is even not able to delete wrongly detected plazes. Thats pretty bad. So lets wait until the guys fixed the fingerprinting.
Gruss
Bernd
In my case it is more a problem of getting this Wlan working – but once it runs, I have no problem in discovering plazes. Just sitting in one new locatoin. ;))
It is not a problem to discover a new Plazes, the problem is, nobody else will see that plaze next time. Here at home after each 24h disconnect Ihave to enter the plazes details again. And most likely somebody else will see this plaze as his, even if he is somewhere else.
Bernd
That would be interesting, as plazes does not go for an Ip but for a Mac Address. If you are at a ‘plaze’ but always grep other peoples networks, then of course you would have to insert them again and again, but then it is not a plaze in that sense?
I never had a problem with fingerprinting the mac addresses of the machines. Did you tell them about that problem?
Yes i did provide some feedback. The fact that dial-up cannot be discovered is described in their faq: http://beta.plazes.com/info/faq/#15
However the problem that users cant delete/merge/mark-dialup a place just leads to much useless work and false places.
I think the fingerprint should include default gateways mac, the nat gateways ip address, the lan network address, default gateway address and netmask. Thats reasonable unique until hardware is changed.
Maybe a list of known-to-be-dialups help in selecting a different fingerrinting algorithm. But FAQ says, they work on it.
Greetings
Bernd