Emerging Technology
Friends 2005: Hooking Up
Your social life will never be the same, thanks to a digital service
called Dodgeball
By Steven Johnson [stevenberlinjohnson.com]
DISCOVER Vol. 26 No. 09 | September 2005 | Technology
If you’ve ever lived in a big city, chances are you know the feeling:
You’re walking around downtown with a few hours to spare at the end
of the day, and you know that somewhere nearby—perhaps only a few
blocks away—there’s a great bar or café that’s packed with
interesting people. If it’s your hometown, you might even suspect
that a few of your friends, or friends of your friends, are hanging
out there. But there’s no easy way to find it, other than by roaming
the streets and peering into windows.
This is what economists would call an inefficient market. You have,
on the one hand, a service that the city provides: bars and cafés
filled with cool people. And you have a buyer willing to pay for that
service. Yet most of the time, the buyer ends up schlepping home
unsatisfied because there’s no way to connect with the service he seeks.
A pair of tech-savvy twentysomethings named Dennis Crowley and Alex
Rainert created a solution to this problem. They call it Dodgeball.
The service is a mix of social network tools (à la Friendster),
simple cell phone messaging, and mapping software. Dodgeball has a
playful, hipster veneer, but the underlying premise behind the
service gives a fascinating glimpse of the way mobile wireless
computing promises to transform city life.
Most of Dodgeball’s interactions rely on the basic text-messaging
features built into modern cell phones. You sign up for the service
and identify other members who are your “friends.” The next time you
find yourself with a few hours to spare, you send a text message to
Dodgeball specifying your location, and the service sends back a
reply notifying you if any friends, or friends of friends, are within
10 blocks of you. Walking in downtown Manhattan, you’ll get a message
saying that Danielle is at the Mercer, while Chris and Dan are at
Luna Lounge. Or you can “announce” your own plans, notifying all your
nearby acquaintances that you’ve just stopped in for a coffee at Le
Figaro Café. Dodgeball even lets you define “crushes” that have a
special weight on the system. If you’ve got your eye on a girl you
met at the last White Stripes concert, you can set up Dodgeball to
send you an alert whenever she’s hanging out within a few blocks of you.
If this sounds like a Friends version of 1984—in which Big Brother is
replaced by that creepy guy you met at the White Stripes concert who
keeps stalking you every time you sit down for coffee—keep in mind
that Dodgeball only knows where you are when you choose to announce
your presence. You can’t be “seen” by other members until you’ve sent
a text message alerting your friends and crushes that you’re at a
specific location. And you can always make yourself invisible to an
unwanted admirer. Dodgeball, in other words, is governed by what
marketers call “opt in” surveillance. So far, the service has been
rolled out in 22 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Los
Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Boston, and Seattle. Earlier this year,
Crowley and Rainert announced that they had sold their two-person
company to Google—so integration with the popular GoogleMaps feature
can’t be far behind.
There’s a fundamental equation to how Dodgeball works in practice:
The more dense the urban environment, the more valuable the service
becomes. No one will sign up for Dodgeball in a one-Starbucks town.
The ideal environment for Dodgeball is one where there are dozens of
potential hangout spots within a few blocks of where you are and
thousands of potential people to hang with. And you only get those
sorts of environments in big cities. The bigger the city, the more
likely it is that you’ll be able to find just the right clique
because the overall supply of social groups and watering holes is so
vast. It’s easy to imagine the model extended beyond your immediate
social network into more narrow needs: Find all the Civil War buffs
within 10 blocks of me, or Jungian psychoanalysts, or native
Portuguese speakers. Or you could query for specific services that
require in-person encounters: Find me the nearest bowl of
vichyssoise, or an available masseuse, or that most pressing of urban
needs—an empty taxi.
Urban theorist Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that,
paradoxically, huge cities create environments where small niches can
flourish. A store selling nothing but buttons most likely won’t be
able to find a market in a town of 50,000 people, but in New York
City, there’s an entire button-store district. Subcultures thrive in
big cities for this reason as well: If you have idiosyncratic tastes,
you’re much more likely to find someone who shares those tastes in a
city of 9 million people. As Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of
Great American Cities, originally published in 1961: “Towns and
suburbs . . . are natural homes for huge supermarkets and for little
else in the way of groceries, for standard movie houses or drive-ins
and for little else in the way of theater. There are simply not
enough people to support further variety, although there may be
people (too few of them) who would draw upon it were it there.
Cities, however, are the natural homes of supermarkets and standard
movie houses plus delicatessens, Viennese bakeries, foreign
groceries, art movies, and so on, all of which can be found co-
existing, the standard with the strange, the large with the small.
Wherever lively and popular parts of cities are found, the small much
outnumber the large.”
The small greatly outnumber the large on the Internet as well. Just
think of eBay’s original target audience: people who buy and sell Pez
dispensers—about as niche as it gets. Online bookstores like Amazon
can maintain vast inventories of lesser-known titles because they
don’t have the real estate constraints of traditional bookstores and
because the Internet makes it so much easier to find the niche
readers who will buy those books. The hot buzzword for this trend is
“long tail” economics; instead of concentrating exclusively on big
mass hits, online businesses can target the long tail of quirkier
fare. In the old model, the economics dictated that it was always
better to sell a million copies of one album. But in the digital age,
it can be just as profitable to sell a hundred copies each of a
thousand different albums.
Dodgeball suggests an intriguing twist on long tail theory. As the
technology increasingly allows us to satisfy more eclectic needs, any
time those needs require a physical presence—whether it’s sipping
your cold soup or meeting your crush in a bar—the logic of the long
tail will favor urban environments over less densely populated ones.
If you’re downloading the latest album from an obscure Scandinavian
doo-wop group, geography doesn’t matter: It’s just as easy to get the
bits delivered to you in the middle of Wyoming as it is in the middle
of Manhattan. But if you’re trying to meet up with other fans of
Scandinavian doo-wop, you’ll have more luck in Manhattan.
The irony, of course, is that digital networks were supposed to make
cities less attractive, not more. The power of telecommuting and
instant connectivity was going to make the whole idea of densely
packed urban cores as obsolete as the walled castle cities of the
Middle Ages. Why would people crowd themselves into harsh,
overpopulated environments when they could just as easily work from
their homestead on the range? But as it turns out, many people
actually like the density of urban environments, precisely because
they offer diversity: Peruvian/Japanese fusion restaurants, live
performances by Scandinavian doo-wop bands, a thousand quirky bars
and cafés teeming with potential friends and crushes. As technology
increases our ability to find these long tail interests,
The number of text messages sent via cell phones or handheld
computers increased from 253 million nationwide for the month of
December 2001 to 4,659,000,000 for December 2004. Roughly two-thirds
of mobile phone and computer users between 18 and 24 send text
messages, compared with one-third for the 25- to 34-year-old set.
that kind of density is going to become increasingly attractive. The
long tail may well lead us away from the dominance of mass hits and
pop superstars toward quirkier tastes and smaller artists. But it may
also lead us to bigger cities.
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