Location, location, location (and social presence)

Location is the next big thing in social presence. but are we there yet?

# Plazes introduced at Reboot their big new v3 redesign. Or I should say their new un-design of the usability chernobyl that was their version 2 website (it’s much better now). They’ve also added status messages, groups and more community features. Will this be enough to finally get them to critical mass? I dunno. Something about convincing me to maintain a whole other social network, community and buddy list just to share location data strikes me as, um unlikely. speaking of this problem…

# Dopplr also made a splash at Reboot. Dopplr is the twitter of travel. Add friends, add your upcoming trips and find out when you might be passing in the night (so to speak). I have many invites! email me if you want one. But again, great idea, lacking integration with my existing social networks. Paging mr facebook…

# Facebook, rapidly becoming the [English speaking] world’s defacto social platform, now has a location-based “Trips” application. It’s buggy and pretty much sucks at this point. But then it’s only about a week old.

So there you have it, great apps with no integration and great integration with no great app.

The race is on to set the standard in social presence locality. So it begins (though don’t forget upcoming.org, Garmin GPS etc. In reality, there are many niches)

[picture – Dopplr conversation on the lawn at reboot9. One moar pic]