Farewell Plazes. Regular visitors will know that I’ve had a Plazes locator on the top right of my sidebar for several months now. After trialling it for a while, it hasn’t made the cut and I’ve finally decided to remove it.
Now lets start by saying there really isn’t anything “wrong” with Plazes, it’s a well presented tool (little bit buggy in some early releases but nothing terrible and the team fixed this), but ultimately it just wasn’t… well, useful!
I feel that location based services really are just an iteration away from being “the next big thing“, but right now, while we can get excited about the fun things that they do (I love geo locating photos in Picassa), for business there really isn’t a requirement. I’ve firmed up this after using Plazes from a position of thinking there probably wasn’t a requirement for corporate, to now being quite certain about it.
I’ll be keeping an eye on it, but at the moment it’s a bit like being the only person around with a Fax machine. Cool technology, but not a lot of point!
Oh and to the Plazes team if they read this — keep it up guys, it’s a great idea and is touching on what I think will be a successful area. I just don’t get it yet and no doubt am in the wrong demographic.
