inside the new plazes (closed beta)

Plazes is a service that tracks your mobile phone and/or the points where you connect to the internet and plots them on a map. You can then add descriptions and images to the new plazes you create so that other users can find them. Another nice bit of functionality is that you can search for Plazes and other users, including your contacts and others who have chosen to make their location visible, within a user determinable distance of 2 or 5 km.

I’ve been invited to try out the new beta version which adds some nice google mapping to the functionality, as well as a twitter like short message function.

Below is the front page, which reminds me quite a lot of twittervision:

Here’s a screenshot of the page where users input their location name and a short message:

The following screenshot is of the page where, like on twitter, a time line of short messages posted by contacts is displayed. On the right is a google map showing where you are and, I assume, where contacts are as well.

I’ll probably do more a review once I’ve been using the new version for a few days…