Plazes gets a major overhaul

My favourite social web app gets anoth­er makeover, and this time it’s major.

The most impor­tant change I’ve noticed is that they’ve ditched the bud­dy list alto­geth­er (which was get­ting imprac­ti­cal due to large amounts of users) and have start­ed focussing more on maps. This is a change I can only applaud; as now it’s even clear­er plazes is all about loca­tion, loca­tion, location.

A look at the new plazes

Plazes can make you famous

Plazes logo

Well – sort of. Yes­ter­day I received a sur­prise vis­it at the office from guer­ril­la vlog reporter Marie-Claire. She’s doing a piece on plazes and decid­ed to vis­it some peo­ple who were online in a radius of 2 to 5 km. The inter­views will be post­ed on the site of Bright – Nether­lands’ own Wired-killer. Make sure you don’t miss my thought­ful com­ments on the many uses of everyone’s favourite geo-social service. ;-)

Plazes sidebar redesign

Plazes, my favourite under­hyped Euro­pean web appli­ca­tion have updat­ed their side­bar. I like the fact that they changed the ranges shown (here, 1 km, 3 km, 10 km, 50 km). Now I can see all the way to Utrecht from Ams­ter­dam. I also like the new “friends some­where else” sec­tion (see the screen­shot). They’ve also clus­tered peo­ple at the same plaze, and (all the way at the bot­tom) have now includ­ed a tag cloud-esque city list. Very web 2.0!

plazes sidebar outtake