Plazes

» see plazes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

plazes never reached me. it was a berlin product for the european tech-blog set, with most of its traction inside germany and the broader europe web-2.0 conference scene. in 2007 the kind of person logging their location to a friend's mac-address database lived in mitte and read jeff jarvis. in 2007 i lived in ankara on a ttnet line and did not yet have a phone that knew where it was.

the product worked by what was then a clever trick. the desktop client would read the mac address of whatever wifi router you were connected to and ask the plazes server "have you seen this router before". if yes, the server already knew that router was, say, betahaus berlin, and your location got logged automatically. you could then push the place name out to twitter or flickr or your blog. it was foursquare two years before foursquare existed, without the points or the badges, with a much more european tone.

nokia announced the acquisition on 23 june 2008 and closed it on 15 july. the plan was to fold plazes into nokia's location stack, which at the time meant ovi maps, later nokia maps, eventually here. the standalone plazes.com kept running for another four years as a smaller and smaller side project. on 4 may 2012 nokia posted a notice that the service would end the following week. users could export their place history into nokia maps. then it was gone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the mac-address trick ~

the technical idea behind plazes was lovely and slightly creepy. wifi routers broadcast a hardware address that, in practice, does not change. so if a user logged "this router lives at vesselka in the east village" once, every subsequent person connecting to that router got auto-located. it was crowdsourced positioning before gps was in every phone, and it depended entirely on enough early adopters being willing to type place names by hand. that worked in 2005 in berlin. it did not survive contact with the iphone.

~ how nokia ended it ~

the nokia of 2008 still believed it could win the smartphone era through services. it bought navteq, then plazes, then dopplr the following year, then ovi was supposed to tie everything together. the plan was reasonable on paper. the execution lost to ios and android over the next four years. by the time plazes was actually turned off in 2012, nokia was about to be sold to microsoft, and the entire ovi services brand had already been retired. plazes was a small line item in a much longer ending.

~ what got buried ~

the polite european tone of plazes did not survive its category. foursquare won the location-checkin race in the united states by gamifying it (mayorships and badges and a whole reward loop on top). plazes was never going to do that. it had a small fanbase that liked it precisely because it did not turn life into a leaderboard, and that fanbase was too small to keep a server farm running. the mac-address-as-place idea reappeared inside google location services and apple's location services, but as an invisible piece of infrastructure, not a product anyone signs up for.

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