NY1: Technology

New Cell Phone Services Can Help Manage Your Social Life

April 06, 2005
Cell phones help you keep in closer touch than ever with friends and now, they can help coordinate your nights out with friends without you even making a call. Tech Beat reporter Adam Balkin explains in the following report.
MoSoSo. It may be yet another tech acronym you‘re going to have to learn to love.
"MoSoSo stands for Mobile Social Software which is taking social software and moving it offline into the real world via mobile phones," says Dennis Crowley of Dodgeball.com. "Any software that brings groups together and those can be defined as things like dating websites, personal blogs, the cc field on your email list."
Crowley was a grad student at NYU when he and classmate Alex Rainert designed, for their senior thesis, what‘s become pretty much the definition of a MoSoSo:www.dodgeball.com.
"There‘s three main features: the first is you tell us where you are and we‘ll tell all your friends where you are; the second is once we know where you are; we‘ll look within a ten block radius and we‘ll look to see if we find any friends of friends, if we do we‘ll alert you both with a text message," says Crowley. "If you have a camera phone, we‘ll even send you a photo to try and introduce those individuals. Also you can go on the website pick off people you have a crush on."
"I would get a message that says: "One of your crushes – but we‘re not going to tell you who – is within 10 blocks. We‘re not going to tell you where, but we just told them where you are, so go make yourself look nice,‘" Crowley continues. "And she would get a message that says: ‘Hey this guy Dennis happens to be over at this bar. He has a crush on you why don‘t you stop over and introduce yourself.‘"
There are other companies working on similar services, some use Bluetooth phones and link people up that way. There are even companies waiting for all of our phones to become GPS-enabled so you could simply be near a wireless hotspot and get a beep that says a friend is sitting 20 feet to your left. But what seems to be making Dodgeball so popular right now, is that it‘s both easy to use and all you need is any phone that allows you to text message.
In just one year of existence Dodgeball already has 16,000 users and works in 22 U.S. cities. Not to mention the service is totally free and is likely to stay that way.
"Who‘s using it? It‘s teens, late teens people in their early 20s," says Lance Ulanoff of PCMag.com. "This is definitely for people who are very comfortable with their phones and very comfortable with text messaging, which tends to be that demographic and they‘re already used to these kinds of social networks this is not new to them, this is a natural progression and so they pick up and use it."
Of course, knowing what your friends are up to all the time isn‘t always such a good thing.
– Adam Balkin
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