Plazes allows you to show your friends (and your fans) where you are physically located and what you are doing currently. The original version did this via some technologies which ran as a small application on your desktop (the “Plazer”) and used your network ID to work out where you were located.

Founded in 2005 in Europe, it faced some difficulties reaching a critical mass in the past. One major reason was the need to download the “Plazer” software to be able to use the service. However, this has changed with the relaunch in May ’07. Now, in addition, you can run the Plazer on your mobile, use SMS, or just update your location via a Google Maps interface.

Just in February, Plazes received a € 2.7 million injection from a venture capital firm.Currently, Plazes claims to have around 50.000 users with a focus on USA with 60%. This is expected to speed up since the relaunch extended numerous functionalities. The newly added features tend to be more like a Twitter like application, allowing users to communicate what you are up to and what you have been doing. Additionally, you have a groups features, which enables places and people to be grouped together – an interesting app for conferences, organisations or for businesses.The potential is there. In my opinion it will depend on how this app can be mashed up with other web applications. Only a wide integration with for example big communities like Myspace will make this service attractive to the masses of internet users.