In his message to Dodgeball users, Dennis Crowley writes:

As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken dodgeball about a far as we can alone … Now that we’re part of Google, we’ll have more resources available to us. That means Alex and I can get back to building new features. We have a lot of ideas that we’ve wanted to work on for a long time and we’re excited that we will now have the time and resources to actually follow-through with them.

Congratulations Dennis and Alex!

I’ve been using Plazes for nearly a year and never had anyone I didn’t know show up where I was at. Until I stopped in the old Aula space (nowadays called Café Java) here in Helsinki to access the free wifi, and noticed a user named Bronek was there too. Curious, I checked his blog. As he was writing about interesting stuff, I emailed him just to say hello. Five minutes later the fellow sitting at the table next to me turned around and introduced himself as Bronek. We both thought it was a pretty geeky (in the fun sense!) way to meet.

Meeting Bronek reminded me about the logical step of integrating place information to IM. This would turn IM into a tool for initiating spontaneous face-to-face encounters. It would be in line with the quest for ‘enhanced social peripheral vision’ that IM is all about.

So, for a start, how about adding a Place list to iChat? It would display my favourite hangouts, and list the users who are currently logged in at those places (to manage privacy, there could be a menu: ‘make my location public’ / ‘allow only buddies to see my location’ / ‘keep my location private’). When I notice a person I don’t know at place where I regularly go, I’d like to be able to pull up their blog by right-clicking on their name. It could look something like this:

Further down the road, with a bit of RSS integration it’d be nice to glance at other online users’ public feeds (to see their latest bookmarks, blogroll, readings, music, etc.)

Similarly, it’d be nice to access/edit a map, tags, and other annotations by clicking on the place.

It was great to meet everyone at the James Martin Institute, and like I was hoping the feedback I got from the talk was extremely useful. Indeed I rewrote the outline of the thesis on the plane to Helsinki. JMI is only a year old, and I have the feeling it could become a place of note in social studies of science and innovation in the years to come. Thanks to Christian for being such a first-class host, to Sam for arranging my stay at New College, and to everyone for the discussions.

The stay in Oxford also marked the end of my residence in England. I’m moving home! Feels great, even though I have no idea how long (or where) I’ll stay in Helsinki.

I’ll speak about innovation at the James Martin institute at Said Business School on Friday, May 6th at 11:00. I’m looking forward to this as an opportunity to get feedback from the sharp folks at Oxford on the storyline that I’m developing for the PhD thesis. For details, see the JMI announcement.