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?"

Comments

Ring them?

[Coopa]

If i'm waiting for friends and i have a mobile, why wouldn't I just ring or sms them anyway?

Re:Ring them?

[Phezult]

Ah, but if you have more than five friends, it could become taxing to do it yourself. Why not be lazy and let a server do it for you?

It would be cooler if the phone had an integrated GPS, you sent the coordinate with "the touch of a button," it figured out the location (which bar) and then notified your friends with the place name. This lets you be even lazier! Their phones could even provide walking directions if they're already drunk...

Re:Ring them?

[Coopa]

Yeah, I suppose. I regularly go out with the same group of people and don't organise it myself (anymore), I ring one person, they ring another and it all filters through. Hopefully.

Re:Ring them?

[netsharc]

In an efficient world, if everybody's assigned 2 people to call, and none of them overlaps, you'd get the message spread through 1,3,7,15,(2^n - 1) people very quickly. Of course that's if the minions agree to everything the alpha-creature says, if there are competing alpha-creatures (when you think of college jocks), you'll never get off the phone, and you'll never get all of them in one place!

Re:Ring them?

[scambaiter]

funny that siemens is already working on an alcohol testing mobile phone.

Network Assumptions

[ejaw5]

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.

Meet people via cell phones

[macdaddy]

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.

Just add GPS

[G4from128k]

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.

There goes my alibi

[TheOtherAgentM]

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.

Re:How does the site make money?

[AuMatar]

Not quite- there's different types of success going on.

Technological success: people use and enjoy the technology. This type of success will outlive its parent company. Either other companies will start if the parent fails or an open equivalent will appear.

Financial success: will the company make money off this? Helped by the first, but not strictly necessary.

Buisnesses making money is the provence of the second success. The technology can still be a success and the company can flop.

Re:How does the site make money?

[Elwood P Dowd]

Ads based on physical location.

Dude: "I'm at Joe's!"

Dodgeball: "Your friend is nearby at Andy's, but Jack's has happy hour right now."

Google was looking to buy this....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bruce Sterling's Killer App.

[bild]

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?

Re:Bruce Sterling's Killer App.

[Per Abrahamsen]

Some replies to those who never read the story, yet commented on the summary.

There are several such networks, and entering one is volunterly. The compete with each other, and in particular with the conventional economy, to which they are a threat since the gift economy is not taxed.

A gift network can only be corrupted to the level where it no longer benefits the members, after that they will obviously leave.

So in summary: It does not go against human nature, unless you believe that "helping other in order to help yourself" goes against human nature. Yes, you can be a computer criminal in that economy, just as you can in the conventional economy (by hacking into a banks central database). But the amount of damage you can do is less, since the economy is less centralized.

It would however undermine the central autority (government), so they would never allow it. Not that they did in the story.

Re:Have we really gotten that lazy...

[Sloth503]

I've been using Dodgeball for a few months now here in Portland. You use it when you want friends to join you, not when you're out on a date or having a private evening. On more than one occasion I've found myself with evening plans (playing pool and drinking beers) only because someone broadcasted a message through Dodgeball. You can call all your friends (or hope your friend calls all of his friends including you...) or you can just send an SMS to everyone when you get somewhere. "Hey I'm here, if you aren't doing anything, come join me..." It really works.

pwb.

Nice to have one of my predictions coming true...

[doom]

Well, it's nice to be right about something for once. It looks an awful lot like one of my predictions is coming true, and roughly on schedule, see this usenet post from January 1, 2001:

Well excuse the tangent, but this reminds me of something I've been thinking about lately. It strikes me that the really compulsive cell phone people seem to be just nervously checking each other's movements. E.g. "I'm on the train, no it isn't late, I'll be there in 20 minutes." (I paraphrase... actually it seems to take them about 5 minutes of repetitious back-and-forth to get out a simple message like that.)

I predict that within five years, you will see people voluntarily wearing location transponders, so that people can take out their palm computers, and quickly identify the locations of all members of their virtual tribe. "Oh, look, Jason, Chelsea and Talbot are all over at the Roaring Sushi Dome. Let's go join them there."

Then you get into the evolution of customs for things like initiation into the tribe, rules of etiquette for when you're allowed to have your transponder on or off, quasi-legal proceedings for ejection and shunning, and so on.

And I guess this is somewhat reminscent of some stuff from the middle novels of Benford's "Galaxy" series (e.g. "Flushed down the Toilet of the Gods", or whatever it was called).

Connecting WiFi to Dodgeball

[sidewayzen]

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.

UK got there first?

[andrewjscott]

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.