Plazes - a small step towards location-based mobile presence

I just started checking out Plazes, a small company that Nokia just acquired. In general their service is about the same as Twitter, giving the ability to enter (by web or SMS) a quick update of what you're doing. The difference is that they work hard to tag each update with a location.



Yesterday I sent in an SMS update saying "Playing with plazes @ STRI" where STRI is the shorthand for the office I work in. Within a few seconds the following appeared as my status:

It had my status as "Playing with plazes" but more importantly gave me a location: It parsed out the location after the @ sign, compared it to the locations that I had defined previously on the Web, and gave me map coordinates in a town in Israel.

For some reason there's no map of that town at the resolution they're showing, but that's another thing. The key point here is that they've geo-tagged me from a simple SMS.

I assume that this feature will soon be incorporated into other mobile blogging systems, including Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger. In the meantime, check it out!