Plazes Bought by Nokia

Plazes (a location based presence platform) announced on Monday that is has been bought by Nokia. The news rose excitement to many.

"It was important to make sure that whoever buys us is actually interested in running and improving the service. So be prepared for some continuous improvements in the months to come."

It’s only natural that when this kind of acquisition occurs (huge company buying small company) people expect some big changes (not always good ones).

Those who have been using Plazes for some time now seem pretty reticent at the possibility that their social service would develop into a trendy but impersonal Nokia geo-presence app. We do have a few examples of “orphans” of this kind - Dodgeball acquired and abandoned by Google or Jaiku, bought and given time out by the same giant company.

Perhaps both companies could use a glance at Del.icio.us just to get a bit inspired. After Yahoo bought the service we’ve witnessed no modification in its structure and still its increase continued with great energy. Moreover, the service proved to be an inspirational pillar to some other Yahoo services.

Some say that a smart move from Nokia would be to use the social geoloation data that Plazes has been collecting from its users for many years and which is currently made available via the new Plazes API in their products while simultaneously offering support to Plazes to develop a solid Twitter contestant enabling geo-presence.

Until we know for sure what Nokia will do next we just have to hope for an inspired approach.