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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?"
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.
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for now at least. See their FAQ: http://www.dodgeball.com/social/help_basics.php
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
They have this thing called a 'location server' and if you (wap developer) pay the service provider ( verizon, telus... ) they will add a extra header your wap/wml requests that contain your current location. ( accuracy depends on positioning methods that are being used, cell-id, EOTD (enhanced observed time difference), AGPS ( assisted GPS ) and can range between 1000 meter to 5 meters.
I thought it would be a blast to play with, but I have not found any way to get the info for free without using their 'simulator' deck viewer.
The worst specimen of this type is the person who carries out massive conversations via text message. I mean, sure it might end up cheaper in the long run by about 30 pence, but you say so much less and in such a less personal manner. To me, all text messages look the same, like it's the same stereotypical airheaded idiot typing them and giggling. Not sure why, that's just the image they conjure up.
There's still a chance to unplug, though. You turned off your phone. Even before mobiles people used to let their home phones off the hook before a night of action. I don't think we'll ever get to the stage where you're locked into an always-on contact method that isn't face-to-face; it would be too invasive for the public to stand.
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.
But as I understand this, the service will send you info about people who you haven't planed on meeting and also about people who are connected to people you know.
Like getting a mess that tells you that one of your friends brothers are at that café across the street...
Or maybe you're at a place with some friends but it turns out they only played really lousy music there, so you take a look in you phone to see if anyone you know are at a nearby place, without having to sms or call all of them.
If this service worked ok and I could restrict who was to be able to find out where I am, I might actually have been willing to pay for it.
The college I attend is spread over a rather large area and it would be nice to see if anyone I know are in the same part as I... =)
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
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
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.