Tracking friends by phone Broken service ADVERTISING Social and mobile New breed of networking Friends at hand and in your face By Yuki Noguchi The Washington Post WASHINGTON — Josh Rosenthal is a regular user of Dodgeball, a service designed
Tracking friends by phone
Broken service
Social and mobile
New breed of networking
Friends at hand and in your face
By Yuki Noguchi
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Josh Rosenthal is a regular user of Dodgeball, a service designed to help friends track each other on their mobile phones.
He tells the service where he happens to be — at the Tryst coffee house, for example — and a friend wandering nearby gets a text alert saying “Your friend Josh R. is (at) Tryst,” ostensibly so the friend can pop in to say hello. Rosenthal can also view the profiles of other Dodgeball users and a list of their recent hangout joints.
But what’s supposed to facilitate his social life usually doesn’t.
“I tried to get people to sign up, but they say, ‘Why would you want that?'” and so the 29-year-old Washingtonian has yet to broker a meeting through the service.
Taking one’s social life and translating it for the phone has become one of the most hyped business concepts in recent months. Such services take advantage of the fact that most phones can track a user’s location, as well as document events through cameras, video and text. Taken together, these technologies can be used to keep users abreast of their friends’ thoughts and whereabouts in real time — basically, turning the cellphone into a kind of social manager.
Mobile networking is commonplace in Japan. But in the United States, it’s still an early-stage social experiment that’s testing how much visibility and always-on access people want to give or receive.
At least a dozen companies bill their services as mobile social networks — some simply reformat Web sites for the small screen, as Cingular Wireless has done since its recent deal with MySpace. Others, like Dodgeball, Loopt, Mologogo and WaveMarket, function more like a combination of messaging and mapping, allowing users to find, track and communicate with groups of their friends over their phone.
Over time, proponents of mobile networking say such functions could extend beyond reading people’s profiles or coordinating party-hopping among friends. They might help parents keep track of children or employers locate their workers. Dodgeball, which was acquired by Google last year, is gaining traction among softball leagues and club promoters who use it to coordinate and publicize events. Some dating services send alerts to singles when they’re near like-minded prospects.
But broad success of mobile social networking probably will depend on more than just signing up enough people to establish a community. The companies behind these services will need to find a balance within their features to avoid backlash from those who wish to stay under the radar sometimes or who don’t want more complexity or visibility in their social lives.
Rosenthal, for example, said the service occasionally reminds him that’s he’s not actually emotionally close to some of the people he happens to be physically close to.
He has had to create distance with some friends by eliminating them from his Dodgeball network. He recently deleted one of his best friends from his mobile social network after that friend reverted to a hard-partying, dangerous lifestyle that Rosenthal didn’t want to support.
“I just no longer wanted to be associated with him,” he said. Thus, their cellphones divorced as well.
