Web Worker Daily

Just as in real estate, location is big news in web apps these days. Today, we’re going to take a quick look at three applications that leverage the power of presence — Upcoming, Plazes, and Dopplr — and see how you might best be able to use them in your daily web worker life.

As we move from local to global, let’s start with Upcoming. Purchased by Yahoo! in October 2005 and now fully integrated into that stable, Upcoming is one of the best web-based event calendars out there. It offers a lot of capability under the hood - microformats, a rich API for you to create your own mashups, discussion groups, contacts, tagging, a mobile interface and geotagging (Yahoo! and Google) to name a few. Oh, there’s also integration with ma.gnolia. Not too shabby.

For me, its best feature is the feed of events you’ve marked that you’re attending. It comes in RSS, Google Calendar and iCal flavors as well as integrating with My Yahoo! I subscribe to my Upcoming events as a calendar in iCal.

Next, there’s Plazes. I’m not sure why this app isn’t more popular - perhaps it’s yet to find its real niche. Almost the Twitter of location apps, Plazes lets you identify where you are and what you’re doing - in a fully geolocated way. As a user, you progressively add to the “plazes” you have been, are at, or are going to, building a history of your location over time. You can also use plazes created by others.

Plazes was recently relaunched with a heap of new features including groups, contacts, tagging and an API for creating those ubiquitous mashups. You can also “plaze” yourself (yes, it’s dorky, but you get used to it) via SMS using a very smart interpretation interface - take my word for it that it’s cool - or using the desktop Plazer tool.

Plazes doesn’t yet appear to have a killer function. 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 - sort of like Dopplr on a local level.

Speaking of Dopplr (WWD review here), it’s the third app we’re going to look at. Dopplr goes global where Upcoming and Plazes are essentially local. That said, it plays very nice with apps like Upcoming (and any other hCal-equipped app), being able to take the calendar information from other sites and embed it in your Dopplr travels. This is a very useful service; one I’ve used several times already.

Like most other social sites, Dopplr has contacts with whom you share your travels, hoping for those Dopplr Moments. They’re also building out a heap of new features including communicating with Dopplr by mobile phone, an API, and recently the ability to import contacts from GMail, Twitter, a local vCard file or using a contact list from a site supporting the HCard/XFN microformats.

Location-based social computing has a way to go before all your apps and contacts know where you’re going to be, when and for what and who you can meet up with when you’re there. But it’s probably not all that far away.

How do you use your location-based social networks?