I've been testing Plazes Mobile Beta for about a week. If you don't know it already, Plazes is the popular social networking tool that, as their FAQ explains, "adds physical presence to the web. The Plazes website automatically detects your location and connects you to people and places nearby. See people in your area, discover other locations and follow the whereabouts of your friends." Well, now it's going mobile.

One big advantage Plazes Mobile has over competing MoSoSo apps is that it ties in with the computer-based version of Plazes as well, meaning that my buddies don't have to be mobile themselves for me to keep track of them. Jim's in the office? I can ping him about work. He's at home? I can give him a call about meeting for a beer on Friday. He's in the pub round the corner? We can have that beer now. This is presence taken to the next level.

Of course, like any such service, its usefulness depends on the size of your buddy list, or at least on making sure that the key people you might want to contact are also signed up, but tying in with Plazes on the PC (or Mac, Linux or even UNIX) is a big plus in this respect.

Where's all this going, anyway? One useful feature that occurs to me could be to let you associate information about the place in which you find yourself to the appropriate cell ID, so that it can then be read by people who subsequently connect in the same place - "X is the most over-priced, over-rated restaurant it has ever been my misfortune to eat at", "Guess which famous person lives here ...", "You can get some real bargains at Y if you're willing to haggle" and the like. Indeed, this kind of thing very much ties in with what Russell was talking about recently at MobHappy in Real World Wiki gets closer.

Of the top of my head, and without making any claims of originality, some other enhancements could also be the ability to restrict who can read your tags, so you can leave private messages for your buddies, and to make your tags time-bound, allowing you to advertise specific events without polluting the cell forever.

But all in all, Plazes Mobile Beta is off to a great start.

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Stuart Mudie is a freelance writer and editor based in Paris, France. His work covers a broad range of technical subjects; visit the smc33 website to find out more.

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