Plazes was the very first location aware service, it was substantially different from Foursquare, Gowalla and so many others that follow in between, but it has indeed been the first. I remember starting using it during Reboot after meeting Felix, using it in a competition style with the likes of Peter, Melo, André and a few others to see who would checkin first and create the plaze on system. It was fun, while it lasted.

Then came Nokia, picked up the project but failed to do anything meaningful to it.
Nothing new in this story… Probably I’ll received an email about yet another great trip service that went down the drain at Nokia.

In any case as I downloaded my data from the system I just decided to write down some of the key numbers from my user profile for posterity:

2,531 Days travelled together
57 Friends
39 Cities
72 Plazes
5288 Activities (aka checkins)

And as closing part a simple thank you to all three original Plazes team members: Stefan Kellner, Felix Petersen and Christoph Maire, you guys were indeed in the right time, on the right place and with the right team

Thank you for Plazes, it rocked.

Today I came across this very interesting concept, a social social interaction experiment focusing on re-humanizing our social condition. Touchy forces it’s user to become itself a social device, active by means of social interaction but unusable if alone.

It’s a project with a clear social concern: we tend to forget that our human condition is essentially social and frequently we hide and avoid sharing social space with others or we simply don’t connect to strangers anymore. We opt for interacting virtually over social media, always present, always available. Touchy is the perfect example of a playful interactions generator.

Touchy hybridizes the roles of human and camera (…) and challenges one’s notion of proximity because the interaction is reduced to the threshold of skin contact (…) transcending psychological connection that gives all its meaning to the expression: “the eyes are the window of the soul.

I simply loved the tech/social/behavioral mixture behind the concept.

Every living thing affects its surroundings. But humanity is now influencing every aspect of the Earth on a scale akin to the great forces of nature.

There are now so many of us, using so many resources, that we’re disrupting the grand cycles of biology, chemistry and geology by which elements like carbon and nitrogen circulate between land, sea and atmosphere. We’re changing the way water moves around the globe as never before. Almost all the planet’s ecosystems bear the marks of our presence.

Our species’ whole recorded history has taken place in the geological period called the Holocene – the brief interval stretching back 10,000 years. But our collective actions have brought us into uncharted territory. A growing number of scientists think we’ve entered a new geological epoch that needs a new name – the Anthropocene.

Probably the best-known aspect of our newfound influence is what we’re doing to the climate. Atmospheric carbon dioxide may be at its highest level in 15 million years. But this is just one part of the story; we’re changing the planet in countless ways. Nutrients from fertilizer wash off fields and down rivers, creating stretches of sea where nothing grows except vast algal blooms; deforestation means vast quantities of soil are being eroded and swept away. Rich grasslands are turning to desert; ancient ice formations are melting away; species everywhere are vanishing.

These developments are all connected, and there’s a risk of an irreversible cascade of changes leading us into a future that’s profoundly different from anything we’ve faced before. Little by little, we’re creating a hotter, stormier and less diverse planet.

The Anthropocene is a decisive break from what came before. Scientists are still debating exactly when it began – was it when our distant forebears started to farm the land? With the industrial revolution? With the dawn of the atomic era, even?

Whenever the new epoch started, we’re living in it now. And if our descendants look back in thousands of years’ time, they’ll see the evidence of our actions written everywhere in the rocks.

more on Anthropocene.Info