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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?"
If i'm waiting for friends and i have a mobile, why wouldn't I just ring or sms them anyway?
I M IN MOMS BSMNT. LOL.
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.
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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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
for stalkers.
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
I think this service would be more useful for avoiding encounters with people whose company you abhor.
Hence the name "dodgeball."
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