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Dodgeball: Text Your Location To Friends
iseff writes "I was listening to NPR yesterday in the car and they ran a piece about this new service called Dodgeball. It's essentially a social networking site, except it's based pretty extensively on text messaging. When you go out for the night, you txt the main dodgeball server your location. It then txt's your friends where you are so they can meet you. It can also tell you who is close-by where you are and how you are connected to those people. It seems like a more 'sticky' and applicable use for social networking when compared to Friendster or orkut (which are always very popular when they launch and then quickly fade). Could this maybe be a decent use to social networking that will last? Or will this bust just as fast?"
Ben Stiller...In the library...With the candlestick
Killer. App.
If i'm waiting for friends and i have a mobile, why wouldn't I just ring or sms them anyway?
will bad ryhming end your hopes for honest replies?
I M IN MOMS BSMNT. LOL.
hmmmph.
Yeah, why don't I go eat some hay. I can make things out of clay, or lay by the bay, I just may. Whaddya say?
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Is it that hard to call a few people on the phone, or heaven forbid talk to someone at work or school to make plans? I don't understand this recent fascination with multi-tasking on your phone. I must be out of touch with the hip crowd, because I only use my phone to talk to people. No games, no sms messages, no camera.
Sometimes I even turn my phone off when I am out somewhere. It's no fun to always feel like you're pinned down by technology. These days no one gets to unplug and have time to themselves because no matter where you are there are 5 ways to get ahold of you.
Just my 2 cents.
This assumes all the people you associate with share the same network (ie click) without any overlap from other networks. But I suppose as you introduce and get introduced to more people you start to expand.
Again...maybe you don't want others (even if they're your friends) joining in on your party for the night.
Watch enough Seinfeld and you'll notice the buddies of Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine often clash. Obviously something like this wouldn't go too well in this case.
$cat
What's the name of the service that lets people check out profiles of people near them via their cell phone and IM them to meet them somewhere? I heard about that on TV I think. This good-looking woman looked at profiles of singles in her immediate area, found one she wanted to meet, and IMed him to meet her at some street-side cafe or something like that. Is that an actual service now or just something some marketing guy thinks will happen someday? It could be cool. Then again you could be IMing the next David Berkowitz to meet you.
This is why Silicon Valley VCs keep fucking up left, right and center. They can't seem to figure out that a business has to make money, regardless of the technology in question.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Step 2: Insert comment about text messaging from your parent's basement.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Karma!
Step 5: CowboyNeal
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I saw these guys presentation at Oreilly's etech conference in Feb... and it does a whole host of geolocation type services.
IT's really quite slick the little sms/email query system they came up with.
It has access to geocoded data, so if you tell the service about your location, besides telling your friends where you are, it can tell you that their's 50 cent drafts down the block... or you can ask it where the closest bar with a pac man or pooltable...
Obviously, this makes the most sense and is the most useful, in a dense urban area filled with younger/hipper crowd with a mobile phone less than 3 years old =P
There are a lot of cool geolocation based social implications... cool spontaneous flash mob type stuff.
In short, I wish I thought of it =( bastages!
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Why was "FBI" just added to my friends list?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
At first I thought this sounded pretty useless. My friends can always just call me to find out where I am, and vice versa.
But I can see this holding some appeal for people with large acquaintance networks who like to bar-hop. It's always fun to run into people you know (assuming you like those people, at any rate) when you're out on the town. Certainly easier than calling twenty plus people to find out if they're within a few blocks.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
I can see this becoming annoying quite quickly. If you had just one friend who used this, but you actually had a life (that wasn't completely dependent on them), you'd constantly get pathetic messages on your phone, despite the fact that you don't want to hang out with them every night of the week. It would only take one overly extroverted person to annoy dozens of normal people.
G
If they added GPS to the mix and an autotrack function (with "do not disturb/do not track" toggle, of course) then people could use the service without having to stop all the time and text the server. The minute you move more than 50 feet from your "official" location, the GPS would recompute and resend a new update. As long as you are in motion, it sends a "Not stationary" message. Once you arrive, it notices the stabilization in position and sends the new locale (maybe reverse lookup to provide a street addy or the name of the club).
Just don't tell your employer that you have this.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
What if I don't want people knowing where I am at all times? Unless this is something you can turn off, I don't see people climbing on board too readily. Think about all those people that are unfaithful within their social circle. It would be kind of strange to know your significant other is always within a couple miles of someone else in your social circle. If nothing is going on, I bet you still find people that get jealous off of this "evidence." Too much technology is a bad thing sometimes. I know. I just read it. I can't believe I said it either.
for now at least. See their FAQ: http://www.dodgeball.com/social/help_basics.php
And there's always the potential problem of having a quiet dinner with a date interruped by marauding bands of Dodgeball friends-of-friends.
Unfortunately, taking full advantage of dodgeball requires both friends (everquest doesn't count) and living in a big city.
Is that the people participating actually leave their houses on the weekends...
: Bathroomn : Bedroom
Dodgeball_SMS(7:30p)Slashdotter_Location: Bedroom
Dodgeball_SMS(8:00p)Slashdotter_Location
Dodgeball_SMS(8:30p)Slashdotter_Locatio
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
for stalkers.
...out of Venture Capital in One Year!
Oh, sorry! Thanks for playing!
I don't understand this recent fascination with multi-tasking on your phone. I must be out of touch with the hip crowd, because I only use my phone to talk to people. No games, no sms messages, no camera.
Adolescent primates try out new things and see how they work. (Typically one of the things they try is breaking one major taboo.)
Sometimes it works out very well. Then they are wildly successful and teach the rest of the primates (starting with their family and cronies) about a new food source, technique, etc.
Sometimes it's a disaster. Then they die.
Most of the time it's just interesting to them and maybe fun for a while, then it gets old and gets dropped.
Adolescence is the right time for this sort of behavior. Adolescents are mature enough that they're not likely to fail just through lack of strength, knowldege or skill. But less of the rest of the tribe's resources are sunk by their loss, and their loss is less damaging to the tribe's future, than if they pull this and lose later in life, say once they have young to raise and others who have become dependent on them. Thus do post-adolescents become more conservative, and less experimental and risk-taking, once they have accepted major long-term responsibilities.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
When one messages their location, determination of the privacy and use of this information should be up to the sender, though that is not clear from the site. Further, the ability to form secure groupings would seem to me important.
SNs still need a distributed, trusted identity infrastructure that enables full user control over their information and potability of authentication and (profile) data storage providers.
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
Hah, usefulness of social networking sites. I always wondered what the point of Orkut was.
In any case, take a look at Simpy (demo or tour) for an example of a useful social (networking tool) that is centered around bookmarks (i.e. something that is actually useful).
Simpy
I don't have any friends or cell phones!
Anybody know how this works? I mean, without one of the new GPS-enabled cell phones, how do they determine your location? Maybe the tower ID is hidden somewhere in the header information when it's converted to email?
I've been looking for a way to determine the approximate location a photo-message (MMS) was taken, didn't think there was a way to do this.
If they are basing this on which tower a person is going through, how do they handle different service providers? Did someone actually map all the NYC towers for all different providers?
Use of this service leaves a record at the server of your location, movements, and who you are associating with.
Maybe the fun is worth it. Maybe not. But if you subscribe, you might want to be careful about who your friends are. If they screw up with the law, the law might just decide you're a gang member, vandal, or terrorist. B-(
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Is this really the first anyone on /. has heard of dodgeball.com??
Whatever happened to just calling my friends and telling them where I am?
Is this too much these days?
This
This sort of thing seems more like the killer app for augmented reality (computer-assisted vision) than for cell phones and SMS messages.
Caveat emptor: Augmented reality does not yet exist in a workable fashion (but it's getting there.)
Combine one of these: http://eyetap.org/
with a geolocation service, and you could do things like, looking at a building and gathering information about its ammenities, contact information (a phone number, a Zagatsurvey rating, etc) and also a list of who, on your contact list, may be inside/in the proximity.
a kind of personal tracking sort of thing.
On my cheap ass nokia, I can create a distribution list. This is The same thing, but now you have to sign into there service, and create a new list. You will probably put the number in your phone first anyway. Seems like a dotbomb business model.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
Wow. Nice spam, jackass.
I haven't really figured out the usefulness of online networking sites, except that they seem to be geared somewhat toward dating - even sites like thefacebook.com and probably orkut and friendster.
Nevertheless, I met a girl at a time when I *absolutely couldn't* write down her contact information, we had a very interesting conversation, and I would have loved have had her contact information. All the googling in the world never found her, but a quick search on thefacebook.com found her within 5 minutes.
We have glorified hide and go seek which adults can play without looking like fools.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
This is just asking to be abused. Someone working at *Insert Nightclub here*, would farm friend's lists and send a txt msg to them saying meet me here! Free advertising.
I think this service would be more useful for avoiding encounters with people whose company you abhor.
Hence the name "dodgeball."
First off, I think this thing is going to take off. It looks like they know how to get the lay user (slickness and press coverage) and the digerati (eg. FOAF import). I hope they push open standards (like FOAF), but I'm sure their business plan imposes some limits. What new features should they have? Tell them at social@dodgeball.com. I wrote in to ask that they add movie theatres as a venue type. Wouldn't it be great to finish seeing a movie and meet friends of friends outside to chat about it?
I think this leaves too many "unexpected" situations, like in Three's Company. Like you send a message to this service saying you're at XXX123 Place and instead of the message going to your buddies or potential date, it goes to your wife/girlfriend/mom/grandma/aunt whoever.
Dodgeball for nerds. I'm sure most of you dorks are used to being bashed by the jocks when it came to dodgeball.
"Dodge this!" --Trinity
I've never heard of it until it was reported on National Public Radio two days ago on All Things Considered
(cool! They're running Apache/PHP on Linux)
[Of course it's client-server; it runs on a LAN]
this looks similar to stumbleupon which "lets you channel-surf pages recommended by friends and peers"
Any socializing structure that requires, by necessity, an electronic mediating device is doomed to failure. As well it should be in a human society.
Anything like this turns human interaction into an episode of Spy vs. Spy.
So, call me a Luddite, and the Hell with ya.
It may be similar, but it's not the same. With Simpy I can search my own bookmarks and create my own mini-Google, for instance. I can't do that with Stumbleupon.
Simpy
Rodney Dangerfield:
Susie called me up. She said "Come on over, nobody's home." So I went over. Nobody was home.
a service provider in Germany has been doing something like this for years. If you subscribe to their service you basically get a username and pass which you can use to access a map on their website displaying your phone's current position. So if your friends know the pass they are able to spot you. IIRC they rely on 3 cells in your phone's range (cell-id I guess) to locate you, so the results can be quite inaccurate.
However it never became popular for obvious reasons. I guess nobody likes to reveal his/her whereabouts 24/7.
I don't read replies by ACs.
http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com
all you people on slashdot are a bunch of fucken nerds who do nothing but talk about crap like linux and those stupid gay geeky things!
dumbasses!
you all need lives!
and who needs linux anyway, windows is better!
Windows is better than linux!
ya it is
Windows is better than linux!
bill gates is cool
Windows is better than linux!
you are nerds
Windows is better than linux!
nobody used linux
Windows is better than linux!
what practicle use does linux have
Windows is better than linux!
i never use linux
Windows is better than linux!
yup
Windows is better than linux!
i have windows xp media center edition on my Dell
Windows is better than linux!
fucken dorks
Windows is better than linux!
Dodgeball is SMS only. http://whoat.com/ does SMS, plain-old-web, and mobile web (XHTML, WAP/WML).
SMS is no fun if your phone can do better, or if you're sitting in a cafe somewhere with yoru laptop +wifi.
Yup. You heard it here first. Basically the creator is a friend of a friend, and I was told all of the details only a couple months ago.
They did a big demo and it worked flawlessly.
The concept is simple enough. Just a simple way to let you know when your friends are nearby. Or when people of the same interest are nearby.
I honestly think it could go either way. Fly or flop.
Personally, I think there will be a niche market for it, but that's about it.
Anyhow, whether or not Google bites, only time will tell.
Now... anonymous or not... eenie meenie miney MO!
Don't need the Karma, and you don't need to know.
i was on mushrooms the other day and my friend called me on my cellphone. I kept looking around for him and when I realized he wasnt in the room I hung up.
on a side note, cellphones are overrated. i dont even ask for people's numbers anymore unless they owe me money. if i see you again i see you again...
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
The best part about dodgeball is that it's SMS only - people can use it with the phones they have today. It's cool that it works without GPS or Bluetooth or Java phones.
I mean, who wants to be that guy that whips out a laptop in the middle of a bar anyway?
Sounds like the next game show from .jp that Spike TV is going to pick up and dub.
;-)
Isn't the website icon a picture of a dude puking? I don't get that... Oh wait, it shows everyone currently at a bar, so maybe it does make sense.
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
I guess it's time to throw out the ol' CB radio, now that CB tag has finally gone the way of the dodo.
Time to embrace the wave of the future!
Oh, wait, I'm sane.
Nothing to see here, move along, people!
So, telephones, voicemail, internet, email, faxes, even Slashdot itself are doomed to fail? You're precluding the possibility of people having functional relationships with anyone that is further than walking distance apart? You must be a Luddite... Or a Nike shareholder. :)
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
In Bruce Sterling's short story "Maneki Neko", everyone has a pda/cellphone thing with pervasive wireless networking and GPS. The folks in the story are part of a P2P network whose symbol is 'Maneki Neko', and whose function is to automates a gift economy.
Say you're in the coffee shop, buying a cup. The PDA buzzes, says 'buy two'. So you do. You walk out with two, it buzzes again: 'give it to the hung-over chap on the bench'. He's psyched, even though he didn't order it, it's what he needed. Since the network has some idea of what you have purchased, what you need, where you are, what you've been doing, and what you have extra of, it efficiently moves goods (and without spoiling the story, personal services) around without there being anyone in charge. And since we have databases, fourteen people don't show up with coffees for the poor lush.
In the story, the main character is having a baby. Unsolicited baby clothes (for the correct sex) show up in the mail, along with toys, etc, sent by total strangers, because their PDA told them to. Presumably they had extra, or their child had outgrown it, or whatever. And since the network often benefits them, they have an incentive to comply with its requests, when they can.
Now other than the rampant privacy problems involved in a world that has such devices and services working seamlessly on a global scale, doesn't it sound cool? And since we're going to end up with a world that has such devices and services working (we hope) seamlessly on a global scale, should we not make such a thing?
bild, www.categoryweb.com
OK, the only reason I haven't signed up is that it's not available in my city yet, but still...
Given that the name of the service is called Dodgeball, I presume that the target audience is the fat slow-moving kids with the glasses. You know, the uncoordinated, clumsy ones who are socially inept and... post on... Slashdot...
Hey, You know what they need here? An Unpost Button.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I heard the same piece on NPR and one of the cool things was that it will notify friends of friends that you're in the area and vice versa. So if the bar you're in is dead, you might be interested to know someone with a common friend is in the next bar down.
Or not.
this sig has been rated E for Everyone.
It is also not slow like Orkut is. And you can actually join them without being invited.
They lack users, being new but I guess that they will get many since Orkut is more and more down or too damn slow.
http://multiply.com/
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
You need to stop reading /.
Take your promotion of your successful social life elsewhere pal!
Slashdot in 5 Paragraphs
Mail lists/Party lines for SMS. Sounds a lot like www.upoc.com I'm not affiliated.
Sorry, but looks like dodgeball's development team beat you to your original 2001 prediction.
From the looks of this article, they've been doing this since 2000.
http://www.dodgeball.com/social/timeoutny.php
And I would have missed it, cuz I never listen to National Progressive (Socialist) Radio.
John Kerry is a Joke!
Of course you're going to be able to turn the tracking on and off. Otherwise it's just a glorified dog collar, and a very serious security threat.
I think it's a great idea. I just wonder how long it will take for people to mod each other's devices so that the tracking appears to be off when it's actually on....
I think this is a clever idea. There have been plenty of times when I wanted to separate from my friends for a while and rejoin with them later on and have spent lots of time trying to reach them on my cell phone, etc.
Another interesting player in this space is WhoAt.com, started by a couple of friends of mine. It's centered around meeting new people in 22 metropolitan areas. You put a profile on their server and tell it where you're located, and then you can opt-in to meet people with similar interests, ages, etc. It's free. I played around with it a little bit and thought it was pretty cool. Check it out.
Your site's on Slashdot!!!
Where's the integration with the AGPS (that supports E911) in mobile phones? I want my phone to text the raw GPS signals, that it can barely decode, to a server, and have the server text that to my friend database. We can find each other without those annoying/expensive voicecalls that boil down to "Where are you? What? Can you hear me now? Where are you?". IBM was muttering about an "Engine 18" tech for my Treo 600, but I haven't seen this for any smartphone yet.
--
make install -not war
Recently on NYCWireless (http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireles s/2004-August/008643.html) I posted about an idea that would make this even easier: area wifi tells people where you are. In effect, your PDA keeps searching for a network to broadcast its position. When it finds one, it checks a node db to see if its a community or public node (like nodedb.com) Poof. Automatic cross-reference of person with location.
In general, IM services should get most centralized. Not like Passport (proprietary, but some universal web service (gaim) that websites could lock into to indicate whether and person is online and ifso, where.
I submitted a piece on Dennis Crowley (the guy behind dodgeball.com, which incidently used to be his personal site, now located at teendrama.com)... he'd previously been on /. for his totally geeked out homemade foosball table. Still a work of greatness!!
JP Styles.
PS Is Jiggity Jill available?
Now if we can just get all of Al Qaeda signed up to this, we'll know where they are ( and how we can avoid them)
The procedure is : Steps :
... now here is real
1) Open my celular phone
2) Select the button to create an email
3) Select a group from the phone list , or select all the people i want to send an email
4) Compose the email, say anything , typing in japanese on the phones is easy because of sentence completition. English is just a pain in the ass.(I am a native spanish speaker)
5) Attach my GPS Location ( in this phones you can attach files, photos, GPS location, Movies etc.)
6) Send
The receivers , of the mail , can just watch the coordinates ( not very useful ) , watch a map of where I am , or trace a route to me (the las service has a small cost ).
I think this is the real trend
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." -- Linus
And not a service to find people to play dodge-ball with, which was my first reaction upon skimming over the blurb. A service to look for opportunities to get hit in the face with a ball just wouldn't make sense.
About 4 years ago when I was on a contract job at MS Research, they were talking about locating people on your buddy list by looking up the location of the cell repeater each person was using. There was a bit of discussion of the Big Brother aspect, and I don't think it was ever implemented. The idea of voluntarily sharing this info with your friends seems kind of cool.
My mobile phone service has the magical capability to multipoint distribute SMSs. This way I can select the people I notify and send a personal message.
Too bad I don't have any friends...
Wow, YOU'RE certainly cool. I bet only several million people who owned GPS and cell phones at the same time had the same idea.
When GSM positioning appeared a few years back, finding your friends was one of the "cool" things you could do. I don't know if it really took off, but a colleague of mine used it to track her teenage daughter (who hadn't figured out you could turn it off...).
The service is still available with Telia.
I have a page at my wiki for discussing such systems. I had created that page before I heard any of them anounced.
I have no friends you insensitive clod!
What could be even more annoying than being spammed by a friend, is being spammed by someone you don't even like. Stuff that comes to mind, off the top of my head:
1. Most of these "social networks" are based on the fundamentally _false_ assumption that if A is a friend of B, and B is a friend of C, and C is a friend of D, then surely A and D will also get along just fabulously.
Which is complete idiocy. Humans are not that one-dimensional personalities. It can well be that A and D are completely opposite personalities and don't even have any common topics to discuss.
I mean just look around you. You surely remember at least a case of some girlfriend's friend who you thought was an airhead. Or some friend's sibbling/parent/classmate/neighbour/friend who you thought was jerk or a complete idiot.
And that's already just two degrees of separation. Go any further and it becomes 100% lottery. The chances to have anything in common are the same as if you picked a random stranger off the street. Because essentially they _are_ a random stranger.
So basically why the heck do I need to be notified that a bunch of strangers are in Jack's pub? I could just go into Jack's anyway and be assured to find a bunch of strangers in there anyway.
2. Friendship is a two-sided thing. When you're free (or even _expected_) to just add people to your friends list without their confirmation, it's getting even more meaningless.
It just means you can get spammed by some people you don't even like. That annoying ex, the local tag-along loser, some relative who actually gets on your nerves, whatever. Now go along that line through several degrees of separation. It's pretty much guaranteed to be more stuff you'd rather avoid than a case of "omg! I must go quickly to the pub so I don't miss him/her!"
3. At the risk of being offensive, I can see the potential for such a service to get choked full of losers.
There's a lot more potential in it for people who just need to pretend they have a lot of friends. No, seriously, anyone who can put equals between a "friend" and being connected through 6 degrees of separation to a perfect stranger, most likely doesn't have any real friends to start with.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I never thought I'd see that phrase used without a guffaw.. amazing.
"Joy is not in things; it is in us." Richard Wagner
A company called Buzz Junction are in the process of rolling out exactly this service into the UK market. The interesting point about these services is it changes the paradigm of the mobile phone from being "contact with people I know" to "introduction to people I don't know but share interests and proximity" - dynamic p2p networking.. www.buzzjunction.com LONDON, UK - May 2004 - Buzz Junction Limited, a leading provider of mobile location service applications announced the arrival of it's latest product, Text Zone(TM), a new interactive Mobile Messaging Service designed to allow people to make connections with others nearby. Text Zone(TM) users can register for free and join communities that share a common interest. The Text Zone(TM) service allows registered users to match up with other community members who are nearby using safe, secure and anonymous SMS text messages and voice calling.
Ties to GPS (location based automation coupled with city map's which can be used for activity for example if he's in a house is it a friends house I.E. party or grandma's?) and a smart solution for determining when you are interested someone is nearby and what they are doing.
Dodgeball_SMS(7:30p)Slashdotter_Location: Parent's Basement
i have a group of friends that i made when we started off at one place of work. as time went by many of us left that company and moved to other sectors/companies/careers (not time went by, it was all in the space of ONE YEAR!!)
.. its a frelling CRAWL)
when i was at the first company i helped create a tradition of going out to a pub at least once a month. it was a way to ensure that we all got out, and that we all met on a fairly regular basis. not everyone makes it to all of the crawls. the crawls when we ALL get together are rare to nonexistent (hey how can i remember
during the crawls many people who were never in teh original company have also been added, and joined the crawl. we currently number about 20 people in the crew, and at least 5 turn up for any given crawl
there are times when one subgroup or the other has gone out, or one of us has gone out and found that another of us has been in the area wondering where to go/what to do.
this kind of tool would help me meet my friends (who i rarely meet at work, or in school or any other setting other than the crawl or MSN) to meet up
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
why? sms's can be sent easily to other networks in properly built cellular network systems
The OP was talking about social networks, not cellular networks. Perhaps this fact would be more obvious if if he had spelled "cliques" correctly (not "clicks").
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Something similar that is already being used. Though I think this is more for meeting random strangers than actual "friends".
Search for "toothing."
Hey all -
/send them a text and tell them to come on over. It's not that dodgeball requires a huge city to work, it just requires pockets of social density within a given area.
Just wanted to take a second to respond to some of the comments here...
Q: How does dodgeball know where I am?
A: Dodgeball is all about the opt-in. You tell us where you are and *then* we'll tell your friends where you are, look for nearby friends-of-friends, etc. This is obviously not the slickest way to gather people's locations, but it's the only way that works with the phones that people carry in their pockets today (and hence the only way to get a critical mass of users).
Q: Why didn't you make it work with GPS?
A: To my knowledge, there is only one phone in the US with an embedded GPS chipset (Motorola i730). While we could build a Java app to work on this one phone, it's much more important to us to focus on platform (text messaging) that is more ubiquitous so that everyone can play.
Q: Why didn't you make it work w/ E-911 / AGPS?
A: Sure, every phone has E-911 built into it these days, but good luck trying to get that location data from the carriers. At best, the carriers will allow J2ME / BREW applications to access that data in the near future (for a per-lookup transaction cost for sure), but even if the carriers do release that data, you still need (a) people to carry Java / BREW phones (we're getting closer), and (b) people who know how to download apps onto those next-gen phones (still a ways off).
Q: Why didn't you use bluetooth?
A: Bluetooth may be really good at finding things that are happening with 35 feet of you, but in most cases the interesting things are happening a few blocks away.
Q: This would still be so much cooler if I didn't have to tell you my location every time.
A: Agreed. Though even when passive location-tracking is available on phones, no one is going to want to carry Big Brother in their pocket. Location tracking is going to have to be as easy to turn on/off as the ringer on your phone - but until that happens, the focus has to be entirely on the opt-in.
Q: Things like this will only work in places like NYC.
A: Not true. Dodgeball works really well in two ways: (1) as an invite tool (tell your friends where you are and they'll come meet you) and (2) as a form of presence (even if I am in for the night, it's nice to know what everyone is up to - in the same way it's nice to look at my AIM Buddy List and see who's online / awake).
In NYC, if I am downtown and get a message that someone is on the Upper West Side, I am certainly not going to hop in a cab and chase them down. But, if I get a message that a friend is two blocks away, chances are I'll call them
Q: What about the "dodgeball becoming annoying" argument?
A: On the web side, Dodgeball works just like every other social network: You request me as a friend, I approve the friend request, we're now considered "friends". When you broadcast your location, you're only pinging people in your 1 degree network of friends. Once we know where you are, we'll attempt to find nearby friends-of-friends (not more than 2 degrees away).
Since we started building the site, we're run up against a number of "social bugs". For example, the "ex-girlfriend bug": Your ex-girlfriend sends you a friend request. You can't say "No" because then you hurt their feelings. You can't say "Yes" because then they'll know where you are all the time. So we built in tools that allow you to "manage friends" - to block people from sending / receiving messages to you without making it obvious that you've blocked that person. On the web site, even if a user has been "managed", the two still appear connected as friends.
We've built dodgeball so that you're only get pinged with messages that are relevant to either your social (e.g. friends) or geographic (e.g. 10 blocks) context.
So if I understand this story correctly, my location is (or could be) visible to my friends' friends. I'm sorry, some of my friends know some people I'm decidedly disinterested in having know where I am. Can't I have a choice in the matter? Maybe the designers don't worry about that sort of thing - but most other women I know do.
As we've learned (the hard way) in computer networking, trusting the next hop (my friends) shouldn't imply that I trust those they/it/he trusts - even their first degree trust relationships.
I've got news for you - this stuff is already here. Just not as you predicted.
Right now, through simple things like triangulation (and other more complicated algorithyms obviously), the cellular network knows approximatly where you are at any given moment within about a block or less area (in a metro area). Combine this with Parlay/OSA (open service architecture), which is (sort of) an API which allows you to use Telecom networks in applications and we see that there isn't really that much need to wait for GPS to become pervasive in cellphones for location-based applications.
In case you (or any other readers) are interested, a few companies that are working in this area are RedKnee, Appium, etc... (obviously google will find more). I was using this stuff about two years ago for university projects, and haven't touched it since. But there seems to be a lot more potential here in the short/medium term vis a vis waiting for GPS in cells.
This is the last place I expected to see this repulsive truncation. The name of the service is SMS.
theres been a similar service up and running in the UK for a few months already (albeit underground...whatever that means) www.playtxt.net where u can flirt with people nearby when your out on the town (friends or others) via txt message or even MMS. just checked out the Buzz Junction thing- playtxt looks a lot more advanced than that. dont think playtxt is the states yet but i read somehwere they were going over the pond soon.
or here
I recently bought an LG VX6000 from Verizon, and after digging around for a while, learned how to get my GPS coordinates by messing around with settings, then dialing a special 922 number (careful, sometimes in some areas, it forwards to 911). Not exactly a practical way to gather it, but it works.
Anyway, those sites have just about everything you'd ever want to know about any cell phone from any company. The free WAP service that you can get on most Verizon phones is pretty sweet.
Alot of people point out, why not just call your friends up. What this system does is lets "internet friends" know where you are, so lets say you have 5 friends in real life, but hundreds on this site (your a bit of a shut in, we know) This will let those "internet friends" find you and meet up.
Say there is someone who you have as a friend listed in your city, and you get a message from them saying, at mall, while you are in the mall, this would allow a great way for social interaction with people you havent meet, but know you have something in common with.
TruePunk | Games
Most mobile services are marketed towards the young & hip crowd (which used to be the 14-21 age bracket but now could be more accurately described as 7-24 for females and 6-18 for males). Many /.'ers, on the other hand, are either Seniors in HS, are in College or work. Having the coolest new gadgets for your friends to admire tends to become less important with age (as priorities change with age).
That's why there are some LBS (location based services) that are marketed towards adults (usually the business type, e.g. find a hotel nearby) and LBS that have a younger target audience in mind (e.g. this stuff).
The other issue is with people's backgrounds. When I was in High School, I had literally 100 'friends'. In reality, those 'friends' were nothing more than acquaintances. Nonetheless, it was important to say hi to everybody in the hall/cafeteria/whereever.
These days, I have a handful of close friends that I try to keep in touch with as much as possible. Sure, I probably still have dozens of acquaintances but most of those are work-related (ie. part of a professionell environment and not your private life). That's why it's easier for me to keep track of what my friends are up to.
I think a lot of the misunderstands in this thread have to do with the different concept of friendship people have. Well, just a thought.
According to the (IMHO) inaccurate Alexa.com - http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=3m&size=medium&compare_sites=&url=friendste r.com#top