Alright, anyone who knows me well enough, knows that I’ve become rather addicted to ‘Plazes‘.

But… what the heck is it?

Plazes is unbearably cool and wonderfully simple. You install a little program called a ‘Plazer’ (aka Launcher) on your computer. This software takes a look at your router’s (the machine that your computer connects to get on the Internet) MAC address, and from that the Plazer can determine an unique identifier for a network. Using this information, it connects to the Plazes server and tells it who you are and the unique ID of your network. The server looks this up on a database and tells you where you are! If nobody has Plazed from your network, the first time you do it, you’re asked for a few details. Primarily the street, city and a title for the … Plaze. That’s it.

Why is this cool? I don’t entirely know, but I love it. I can see who’s nearby, where my friends are.
Invasion of Privacy? Well not really, I’m volunteering this information, and I can be sufficiently vague when necessary.
They know details of my network? Nothing particularily useful. MAC addresses don’t matter on the Internet, or beyond the confines of your own network. Trust me – I’m a networking/security professional – this is pretty harmless info. (And any half-brained hacker could determine in about 5 miliseconds anyway)

Today’s updates to Plazes really make it feel Web 2.0ish. While I’m not entirely excited about that part, there’s lots of other cool, new, but subtle features. The flash locater above being one of them. I’m a little disappointed that it’s not as social-networking-centric as it used to be, but maybe I just haven’t explored enough yet. One thing that is really missing is the RSS feeds! I want my Trazes back! I’ve posted to their ‘blog about this… see what comes of it. Till then, Mike.Geiger.ca is going to be a little weird looking. 🙁