Plazes social networking service bought by Nokia

In an interesting move, Nokia has bought out Plazes, the social networking site for allowing users to mark places that they have been for others to look at. This creates location-based services and avoids the need to have GPS which provides absolute location. Plazes creates semantic location. As long as you have some kind of internet connection like Wi-Fi you can track where you are and write comments, put photos or mark what the location is. I've tried the service and I really liked how it worked, although I haven't been using it for a month. It is kind of like Intel's PlaceLab where location can be annotated and hotspots found contributed by people rather than having to provide GPS or radio-type location technologies (like triangulation).

This is a good acquisition for Nokia because Nokia does not seem to be very much in the social networking arena and the next step is social networking on mobile phones. Integrating Plazes with the Nokia phones would provide the next logical step to providing ubiquitous location-based services, and will be part of Nokia's vision of "Connecting people".

On Technorati: Plazes, Nokia