NEW YORK — For Lucas Graves, a freelance writer, nights out are now peppered by the intermittent beeps of incoming text messages popping up on his cell phone.
"When I go to a bar on Friday or Saturday night, I get about eight or 10 messages telling me where my friends are and which of their friends are nearby," he said. "I find it really amusing."
Graves is a subscriber to Dodgeball, an online networking community that allows users to keep track of their friends as well as broadcast their own whereabouts during an evening out, via their mobile phones.
"We like to say that Dodgeball connects serendipity with
technology," said Dennis Crowley, 27, a founder and partner in the service. "It gives you the power to take control of your evenings."
Dodgeball works this way: Registered users check in via their mobile phones from one of 4,000 bars or restaurants in New York City that are listed on the Web site.
The site immediately broadcasts their location to all their friends. It also checks for friends of their friends who are at restaurants or bars within 10 blocks.
Other features include the ability to look for an establishment within the area that possesses specific features, like great margaritas or a pool table.
Users can also broadcast messages to other Dodgeball subscribers who have checked in within 10 blocks.
"Last night I was walking home at around 2 when I suddenly got a message that a friend had checked in at a bar nearby," Crowley said. "I met up with him and a couple of other people. It wouldn't have happened otherwise."
What started out in early April as a network made up of a small group of friends has now grown to 2,300 mobile phone users in New York alone. And there are more than 4,500 people registered on the Web site.
"The response is far beyond what we expected," Crowley said. "We now have the problem of too much traffic on our Web site."
Dodgeball brings together the need for human interaction and the obsession with high-tech toys. In a way, it provides a new crutch for lonely (and in many cases, lazy) individuals to meet new people and muster up friends for a night out.
"The service appeals to our innate sociability," said Duncan Watts, associate professor of sociology at Columbia. "The recent development of technology enables it to function."
Crowley and Alex Rainert, 27, were veteran dot-commers who chose to reinvent themselves rather than fade away. They met at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2002, shortly after the boom went bust. Rainert was a programmer, while Crowley had been running a New York-based online city guide for the previous two years.
The guide already boasted an impressive list of bars and restaurants in the New York area. What the two created was a service where registered users could apply the geo-coded locations of these nightspots to coordinating their evening's activities with their friends. There is no charge to sign up, at dodgeball.com, though the user is responsible for any phone fees.
"While the concept is mine, I'm still amazed at how it works," said Crowley. "It's changed my idea about nightlife almost entirely."
Dodgeball currently serves New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Philadelphia. Other major cities are in the pipeline.
The service is similar to Friendster, another online networking community that also links complete strangers to each other through common friends. The difference is that, rather than just connecting one friend to another in a network, Dodgeball allows people to pinpoint where someone is at that exact moment and to get in touch with them immediately.
Sociologist Watts remains skeptical of such services. He says none of these companies has provided a compelling answer to the question: "Why should I join?"
"These services all suffer from 'network externalities,' which is to say that their value depends on the number of other people subscribed," he said.
"In the case of Dodgeball, it's conceivable that if everyone with a cell phone in New York joined it and regularly entered their locations, it might actually be fun and maybe even a little bit useful. But until at least a large critical mass is actively using it, it seems more annoying than anything."
For the time being, Crowley and Rainert are working around the clock to manage a Web site that is almost entirely user-supported, and swelling at a frantic rate. The challenge, they say, is to keep constant track of the new ideas and needs of users.
"There are times when friends have said, 'It would be great if you guys did this.' " said Crowley, "And we're like, 'It's done. We put it up yesterday.' "