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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?"
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.
You clearly don't go out with a large (constantly changing) group of friends.
Sure, when there's 2-3 of you regulraly going out it's easy to coordinate. Once you have 20-30 people in a group of friends, some of which are coming out on a given night, and some which aren't then it gets extremely tedious to:
a) Invite that many people to begin with and not forget anyone.
b) Keep track of who's coming out that night and who isn't.
c) Continually update people who haven't yet arrived as to where you are right now.
rm -rf / is the evil of all root
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
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
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
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.
I think this service would be more useful for avoiding encounters with people whose company you abhor.
Hence the name "dodgeball."