Bye, bye Plazes!

Plazes.com has gone out of service. On July 1st all personal data (including account info) will be erased. It has been bought by Nokia in June 2008 and parts of it are now getting integrated into Nokia Maps.

Time to say goodbye!

I was user 223 and registered on July 15, 2004 00:05. Plazes was launched on August 16, 2004. It was the first geosocial networking site that I know.

For comparison: Gowalla launched in 2007 and Foursquare in 2009.

The first Plaze where I checked in was:

408 CO4 Communications office Stuttgart 70178 Baden-Württemberg DE Tübinger Str. 19b 48.771960636115 9.1742873841973 http://www.co4.de 1584 5 2004-07-07 20:58:59 UTC 2005-07-11 15:15:46 UTC 842

That’s where I learned how to optimize HTML, CSS and JavaScript for browsers like Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold and Internet Explorer 5.0. Thank you for the good times! By the way: Some of my former colleagues now work at VISIA GmbH and they are looking for a senior project manager and web developers.

Plazes was the first project for which I was contributing in my free time, followed up by a donation for the two-page advocacy ad for Mozilla Firefox 1.0 in the New York Times in December 2004.

plazes launcher (.NET version)

I developed the plazes launcher at a time when the .NET Framework 2 was still in BETA.
It was a little tool which ran in your Windows system tray / notification area, automatically detected your network location and sent it to the Plazes servers to check you in.

In addition to the original version, mine was faster and able to work with VPN connections, proxies and firewalls. You could send messages to buddies via tray menu or mail icon and you also got alerts for new messages and friendship requests.

It was also featuring a people radar and automatic updates. You could run it on Microsoft® Windows® 98, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, Microsoft Windows NT® version 4.0 with Service Pack 4, Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Microsoft .NET Framework Version 1.1.

The last published version was release 0.1.6.0 (633 KB) on 14.06.2005.

In addition to developing the plazes launcher (.NET version) I also bought the domain codeplaze.com and started running a developer portal incl. a wiki.

Heck, I even own a polo shirt with their logo printed on it. It was an interesting journey!

Thank you and bye, bye…