Discovering Plazes

There are approximately one million social, sharing, community Web 2.0 applications currently in Beta, and they're breeding (almost literally, as mashups :-) ). At lot of them, if not most, seem to stretch credibility to breaking point (for example, a community site for lonely bloggers ? Haven't we already got MySpace ?). But one which seems to offer some entertainment value, and is easy to set up, and combines various things in an intelligent way, is Plazes.

Unfortunately, although Plazes has over 4000 locations registered in Switzerland, they are mostly located in the north, and it does not seem to have grabbed much attention in my neighbourhood yet. And even when it has, the political geography seems a little off...

... and this idea of needing an application to track where your friends are seems a little dysfunctional, in a tech geek sort of way - but the extension to mobile does seem possibly interesting, especially for mundane things like finding gas stations or restaurants.

As for the business model... AdSense, I suppose. Good luck with that.