May 31, 2007
plazes shoots own foot off
I've been using plazes for ages to track where I am and what I'm doing, etc. Some time in the last few days they've:
- broken the rss feed
- broken the widget on my blog
- removed the desktop tools from their site
- reworked the website maps to be less friendly
I'm pretty sure that's removed every single useful piece of functionality that drew me to their service in the first place.
I just updated the plazes desktop tool I had, and it's been replaced with some half-baked twitteresque GUI nightmare. Hey, Plazes, you're not twitter, and that's why I liked you! It took me a while to figure out how to connect in the GUI, it occupies more screen real estate than before, and it's removed the client map feature that I liked.
I just signed back in to their website and was asked to re-enter information that I'd already provided them with (my IM details, my web presence, etc).
I've been looking round their site for a replacement blog widget, with no luck. Plazes, here's a hint: I'm only going to edit my blog template once. If there's no drop-in replacement, the edit will be to delete plazes altogether. Your loss. And if I'm not able to display my location on my blog, I'm not likely to continue using the service.
The neat URL that I used to be able to hand out to people: http://plazes.com/whereis/andrew now no longer works. It's replaced with the delightful http://plazes.com/users/5812 -- I'm a person damnit, not a number! I'm not even going to make it a clickable link, or hand it out to people. Did they never read Cool URIs Don't Change?
Awesome work, plazes :-( I thought plazes getting funding would improve the service, but from these actions I guess it actually means you can now afford to alienate your users.
Now if the dopplr folks could add some of the plazes features, I'd be happy.
Update: Plazes responded ... see comments.
Technorati Tags: gis, maps, mobile
Posted by savs at May 31, 2007 5:31 PMSorry about the bad experience you had. We made some sacrifices to make things easier in the long run, but it'll take a lot more time to polish.
Anyway, about your whereis URLs on plazes - they are now automatically your username, ie. you can use: http://plazes.com/whereis/savs - so that new users do not have to make the extra step of 'picking' a URL. When making that change we had to break the backwards compatibility, otherwise an existing picked URL would be able to overshadow some elses username URL. It didn't look like the picked URLs were published that much, so that seemed like a worthwhile tradeoff. Seems like you were one of the few who had picked a URL that is now taken by someone elses username. Again, sorry about that!
Posted by: til at May 31, 2007 6:12 PMso I am also getting irked at these guys. have the new widgets convinced you otherwise to stay? I am still undecided.
t
Posted by: thomas at June 21, 2007 1:47 AM