new plazes beta test: first impressions

I had the unparalleled pleasure of meeting (a fraction of) the plazes crew at the designmai on Friday. News: There will be a new plazes soon (yay!) but they will discontinue the mobile plazer app for symbian phones (sob). Stefan told me that only 10 people in berlin are using it - and I am one of them. I was so struck by the bad news that they gave me a beautiful plazes t-shirt (Daniel liked it) and invited me into their new (closed) plazes beta that I just tried out. The new features that struck me first:

1. plaze yourself over the web
2. twitter functionality (tell everyone what you're doing)
   
3. set past and future plazes
4. groups

I think that web-plazing is the most important feature because it will allow people to use plazes who do not carry their laptop with them all the time but use different desktop machines at different places (Hans? you'll have to join now, dammit). I also think that it is really important to have a small dashboard-page that you can run in a small browser window that lets you set plazes and twitter easily. Web-plazing probably makes up for the loss of the mobile plazer, but I don't really see sms-plazing as a full replacement because it is much slower and much more cumbersome. (The increasing popularity of twitter and the inclusion of this functionality into plazes proves my first negative comment on twitter wrong). Setting past and future plazes also adds to the functionality. I have yet to explore the benefits of the group stuff. AFAIK no official release date yet.