So it was a sort odd, synchronicity feeling: I decided to turn on my laptop ridiculously early this AM to jot down some thoughts about the possibilities arising from a better fusion of proximity and place oriented social sofware (specifically manifested in the Plazes beta, about which I have written this and that already) with industrial strength instant messaging (specifically the 2Entwine Gush product, about which I have scribbled mightily). Then I noticed guest blogger Marc Eisenstadt's first post, where he wrote:

[from Greetings + Synchronous Social Software 1]

One of the many reasons I'm delighted to be here is that Stowe has long been the Daddy of what I like to think of as Synchronous Social Software... a category still so new that if you run a Google search for the quoted string "synchronous social software" you find, well... that this is, until now, really a very rarely-used piece of jargon. But unpack the jargon and you find that Stowe has been writing about precisely this niche for many moons now (in addition to having coined the more generic phrase "Social Tools" some 5 years ago!)

And that's exactly what had me tossing and turning, so I had to get out of bed to write the ideas down.

All I Want: Plazes + Gush

Plazes is among the first social software technology that I believe that I will actually use, and it is exactly because of the blending of its proximity and place based capabilities with with synchronous communication opportunities. But of course, I want more.

Plazes brings together some critical elements that match my wish list for social software:

• I want to keep tabs on "the known": basically, those on my buddy list.
  
• I want to know if those folks are online, and where they are.
  
• I am interested in meeting other folks, wherever they may be on Earth, who share my particular interests and obsessions.
  
• I travel a lot, and have difficulty letting people know where I am, but, in general, I want my friends to know, without bombarding people with a stream of spammish emails or IM alerts. So basically, actual location should become an aspect of my presence: this is what Plazes offers, at least in part.
  
• I am interested in knowing more about my immediate surroundings; for example, who are the other people typing away at my local the Starbucks? Or, at a slightly larger scale, what do my friends and others think of the restaurants, stores, hotels, and in my immediate surroundings? What interesting things have happened in Cafe Montmartre (a local bistro I tagged yesterday in Plazes) recently?
  

But I want it all smooshed together, not apart.

Plazes supports RSS feeds from defined Plazes, so you can subscribe to the feeds and be alerted when others tag your haunts. This could also be a means of alerting interested parties to events. Ann, the owner of Cafe Montmartre, could alert me and the other habitues of that bistro about an upcoming wine tasting or musician's gig.

That part of it is already 'integrated' since I have my existing RSS reader. But what is left dangling is the integration of presence.

What I want is to have a client on my desktop pull the piece together. Note that Plazes relies on a desktop client to login to the Plazes network, but it doesn't do much besides login and send location information it lifts from the router.

Instead, Plazes should offer an integration hook for IM clients like Gush, so that I could have a much richer integration of presence indication:

• Every buddy that participates in the Plazes solution would be tagged with geolocation as well as on/off/away presence and availability.
  
• Plazes of interest to me would also exist on my buddy list, so I could keep tabs on them: how many folks are there, how many new tags, network status, how many subscribers to the RSS feed.
  

Note that I already had a discussion with the guys at 2Entwine this week about a new wishlist item: allowing me to put RSS feeds and buddies on the same display, not in two separate worlds. I want to see Marc Eisenstadt's presence right next to My Dog stats. And now, I want to see his geolocation and be able to access the RSS feed from the Plaze he is working (or playing) in.

Dudley and Wes of 2Entwine said relaxing the false dichotomy between RSS feeds and buddylists in Gush should be relatively easy; what I am wishing for here, is however, a major undertaking, and would require all sorts of efforts on the part of 2Entwine and Stefan Kellner and Felix Petersen, the masterminds behind Plazes.

These two groups don't even know each other. But they soon will be introduced, trust me.