ONE are the nights when Brian Battjer
left barhopping in New York to chance.
He took control of his social fate when he signed up for
Dodgeball.com, a free social-networking service that is becoming
popular with young singles. The site uses cellphone text-messaging
to wirelessly connect thousands of friends, and friends of
friends.
Just hours after he subscribed, Mr. Battjer, 27, received his
first Dodgeball message: Alyssa, a friend of his friend Greg, it
read, was at Luna Lounge, only two blocks away. Mr. Battjer had
never met Alyssa, but inspired by the thumbnail-size picture sent
with the message, he decided to find her. The two met and shared
laughs over their mutually "dorky" fascination with technology, he
said.
Mr. Battjer, chief operations officer of Watson Adventures, a
company that organizes scavenger hunts, is now a regular Dodgeball
user.
"Dodgeball has changed the social fabric of everything," he said.
"The technology augments the social experience in a way that has
never been done before."
Mr. Battjer is one of 5,000 people who have subscribed since the
social-networking service was introduced on April 5 in New York and,
two weeks later, in Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los
Angeles.
"We think of it as technology facilitating serendipity," said
Dodgeball's founder, Dennis Crowley, 27, who just received his
master's degree from New York University's Interactive
Telecommunications Program.
Based on the mutual-friends model popularized by Web sites like
Friendster, Dodgeball helps users meet up with their friends or new
acquaintances - but while they're out on the town instead of sitting
in front of their computers.
"Friendster was a lot of fun, but does it actually do anything?"
Mr. Crowley asked. "Dodgeball can change the course of an
evening."
Dodgeball members subscribe through the site, then build a group
of friends by linking up with current users or, as with other
social-networking services, by inviting outside friends to join
their networks. Members become "friends of friends" with the friends
of Dodgeball users they invite to their network.
When members want others to know their whereabouts, they use
their cellphone to send a text message (like "@ Luna Lounge'') to
the Dodgeball e-mail address for their respective city, like
nyc@dodgeball .com. The service matches the location in its database
of geocoded bars and restaurants, and sends an automated text
message with the user's name and location and a head shot to all of
their Dodgeball friends, as well as any friends of friends who have
checked in within a 10-block radius.
Dodgeball.com is popular among barhoppers. Many say the service
is a good alternative to calling friends from noisy nightspots.
"It's like a shortcut," said Alexander Clemens, 36, a political
consultant and Dodgeball user in San Francisco. "All it takes is one
quick note to tell my friends where the party's at."
Others join Dodgeball to meet new people. Pictures sent with
Dodgeball messages help users spot one another in a crowd, or act as
an incentive for on-the-prowl singles to meet friends of a friend.
Mr. Battjer says he feels comfortable meeting up with the 90 friends
of friends on his Dodgeball network because each is directly
connected to at least one of his 16 Dodgeball friends. At
Friendster, friends of friends can be estranged by six degrees of
separation, but Dodgeball allows only two degrees of separation.
Mr. Crowley (who says there is no particular meaning to the
site's name) began an early incarnation of Dodgeball four years ago
as a city guide based on user-contributed content. It didn't catch
on, however, so he and his classmate Alex Rainert, 27, turned it
into a social-networking service for their master's thesis project.
Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor of communications at N.Y.U.,
predicts that with a little time and fine tuning, software that
"caters to users' geography rather than their affinities" will take
off with the same force Friendster did two years ago.
"It has already been successful," Mr. Shirky said. "But
eventually, Dennis and Alex are going to figure out uses and
applications they hadn't even thought of before."
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