I have been a loyal user of Plazes or more specifically, the Plazer for almost two years.  During this time I have been Plazed over 1,000 times in over 100 Plazes, representing nearly 50 different cities.  Its really pretty cool to look back at my world map and see all of the different places I’ve tagged.

The shame of the whole thing is that I really like using the Plazer and I don’t want to stop using it.  I like the concept and if I could find a replacement I would use it in a heartbeat.

OK, so by now you’re probably wondering why I’m going to stop using it.  Well, Plazes was recently acquired by Nokia, and since that acquisition, the Plazes Crew has been hard at work on something new and exciting.  So new and exciting in fact that they have decided to release absolutely no details as to what they are working on.

The Plazer needs some work, which is the real reason that I am going to have stop using it.  I have not been able to get the Plazer to check in reliably since I switched to Windows Vista.  But, even under Windows Vista I was able to get the Plazer to run and I could perform a manual check in.  Along came 64-bit Windows Vista… and PRESTO!  No more Plazer.

I have posted messages in the Plazer support forum, sent emails to the Plazes Crew, but still have not come up with any answers.  I even considered using some kind of application virtualization to trick the Plazer into working on my laptop, but I really don’t think I should have to go that far.

My fear is that since Plazes was acquired by Nokia and since Nokia has fairly vested interest in the cell phone market that the application development efforts are focused solely on creating a GPS or cell tower based geo-location service for… Nokia devices.

I hope that I am proven wrong and I hope that one day the Plazer will once again live in my system tray, but until then… goodbye Plazes.