The website http://www.dodgeball.com/ offers
nothing about the new Ben Stiller movie, nor anything related to that
merciless childhood sport, but it's still hitting the mark for its circle
of social networkers.
Let's play. Say, you're at Star Shoes on some
Friday night and you're just not feeling the crowd. Need some
reinforcements, huh? E-mail Dodgeball with a text message like "@Star
Shoes" and Dodgeball will then send a text message to all your friends
in a 10-block radius (perhaps they're at the Room, Nacional or Boardner's,
whatever) indicating that you're just a mildly drunken stagger
away.
Or, say you have a good suspicion that some of your friends
are hanging out close by, but they didn't tell you. With a different
function, Dodgeball can tell you which of your friends are in the same
radius without letting them know that you're snooping.
Of course,
none of this works until you and your friends sign up at Dodgeball.com,
which brings us to the inevitable moment of our era's friends-ied
obsessions. "As soon as we dropped the Friendster model on top of
Dodgeball," says Dennis Crowley, founder and CEO, "it started to make
sense to a lot of people."
Yes, on the Dodgeball site, you can
assemble your circle of friends, which then gives you access to your
friends' friends. (Dodgeball doesn't let you go beyond two degrees of
separation.) Dodgeball can also filter certain friends from receiving your
text messages; say you've accepted an invitation from your idiot co-worker
to maintain an amicable work environment, but you really don't want him
cramping your style outside the office.
But if you don't give a fig
about today's network fussiness, there's still a pretty useful feature:
Punch in "El Rey?" into your cellphone and Dodgeball will respond with the
address and cross streets for El Rey.
"As much as we've been called
'the Friendster for mobile phones,' we're really completely different,"
Crowley says. "We built Dodgeball as a social networking tool that you can
use when you're actually being social, not when you're sitting at home in
front of your PC."
Case in point: Dodgeball has a feature that
allows you to compile a "crush list" of fellow users. If someone on this
list checks in within a 10-block radius of where you've checked in,
Dodgeball will notify you and the person you've been modestly
stalking.
There are certainly some obstacles in Dodgeball's overall
reach, so don't bet on its coming anywhere near Friendster's 7.5 million
users anytime soon. "I have tried to get my friends to do it," says Robert
Puckett, 23, who has friends on both coasts. "You would think that the
site would appeal to most of your Friendsters. The problem is not everyone
is a huge texter."
Americans just aren't as text-messaging happy as
people in other parts of the world. Andrι Sevigny, vice president of
business development for the mobile marketing firm Enpocket, says it's not
because of culture or economics; limited text-messaging functions on some
phones and the lack of interconnectivity between American carriers have
been the real culprits.
But Sevigny says things are changing. His
company's research shows that more than one-third of America's 157 million
mobile users actively text message, and its use spikes to 57% among 18- to
24-year-olds. He also says that 12% of mobile users actively send and
receive photos, important in Dodgeball's meet-and-greet
culture.
"Once people understand how to do it, we'll see a viral
spread of text messaging," Sevigny says. "Simply because if your family or
friends send you a message, you'll want to find a way to send a message
back."
Dodgeball is catching on fairly well in New York City, where
the bulk of the site's nearly 7,000 registered users live (the newest
Dodgeball cities include Seattle; Austin, Texas; and Washington, D.C.).
It's not too surprising that fewer than 1,000 are from Los Angeles,
according to Crowley. Says frustrated Dodgeballer Amy Wang, 27, "With the
way L.A. is geographically laid out, I think Dodgeball is a much tougher
sell here."
Good point outside of a few bar-hopping strips around
Hollywood and West Hollywood, since when in L.A. was one part of your
evening 10 blocks away from the next? Unlike the sidewalk explorers of
lower Manhattan, this is how we kick it: You make plans to go out, you
drive 20 to 60 minutes to your destination and meet up with the friends
you expected to see because you had told them of your plans.
"Getting in a car and heading 20 minutes away is a much greater
commitment than walking out my door and heading two blocks north,"
acknowledges Crowley, who lives in New York. "The Dodgeball experience may
not be identical in every city, but there's no doubt that our users get
what we're trying to do.
"A lot of it is tweaking the application
on a city-by-city basis. Ten blocks is a great filter in New York, but
maybe we should increase it to one mile in L.A."
How about 10
miles? (Everyone forgets the Valley.)
Tommy Nguyen can be reached at
weekend@latimes.com.
