Plazes is a Berlin based social networking site centered around location or what they like to call ‘presence’. Since about a week they started a developer version of the their main website that will allow for some more experimentation. While plazes was mostly oriented on locations in the world as opposed to locations in a venue or room it was never very relevant to what we were doing at the Roomware project. Yesterday however they announced they will be extending their normal identification method of using your routers MAC address to include any sort of network address including for instance Bluetooth addresses.

The interesting new feature is that the networks parameter is simply a set of key-value pairs, and you can use anything as the key. So instead ofmac_address, for example, you could pass a GSM Cell ID, or a Bluetooth Device Address.….  

Once I’ve done that — gluing the Bluetooth Device Address, using the key bd_addr to the Plaze — I can now build a mobile application that scans for Bluetooth addresses and queries Plazes 

 

This is where it gets more interesting as far as Roomware is concerned, their method of using these keys as identifiers for presence could serve as an interesting use case for our own implementation of this sort of location ‘mapping’. One simple Roomware example we often talk about is using a batch of Roomware servers to act as Zones for a location for instance. Whenever someone is near one of the Roomware servers they are detected and can be placed on a map which can then be used by other applications to make a friend locater at large events or a historical timeline of visitor activity.  It’s nice to see some more working implementations in this field and maybe even the start of some standards for working with presence and network identifiers.