Over at Web Worker Daily they’ve included Plazes in a review of three “presence apps” (thanks!). They write, in part:

I’d like to see it include microformats such as XFN, hCard and geo, as well as the ability to identify when you and someone you know are near to each other …

The “someone you know are near to each other” feature is something I’ve longed for in Plazes for a while; I haven’t heard anything about whether it’s on the radar screen however. Perhaps, once the snazzy new API hits the streets, an enterprising third-party developer will mash something up; certainly all the hooks will be there to enable this sort of thing.

What is in place now, at least in a tentative way, is microformat support.

If your reaction to that is “huh?” you may wish to read this introduction to microformats. Microformats are neato, and worth understanding.

If you’d like to see Plazes’ microformat support in action, here’s all you need to do:

1. Using Firefox, download and install the nifty Operator extension
2. Visit the page of any person or plaze on Plazes and watch the magic happen.

What magic?

Plazes encodes two sorts of information in microformat goodness: people and plazes. Visit the Prime Roast Coffee plaze, for example, and you’ll see information about the plaze itself and information about the people (me!) who’ve been there:

If you look at your Operator toolbar in Firefox, however, you’ll see that because this information is also wrapped up in microformats, you can grab the same information you see on the web page in a variety of different ways. For example I can take the address of the Prime Roast Coffee Company and automagically export it to my address book:

I simply click Export Contact in Operator, and my Mac Address Book opens up and creates a new entry for the coffee shop:

As you can see from the Operator menu, I can do a host of other things, from calling up a Google Map of the plaze to exporting it copying it with Live Clipboard. And I can do the same thing for any of the people who’ve been at the plaze.

You’ll find microformat support across Plazes.com — on the pages of individual plazes and people as well as on your list of contacts, the list of all the plazes you’ve ever visited, and for Plazes groups.

Currently Plazes microformat support includes formatting people and plazes in the hCard microformat and the geographic location of plazes in the geo microformat. As Plazes evolves there may be opportunity to incorporate additional microformats; if you’ve got ideas, please leave them in the comments to this post.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.