Dodgeball always sucked in elementary school but is quite nifty now

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Woo! I got a nice bonus today at work as well as a (rather nice — not pizza this time) free lunch! The (highly likely) prospect of a raise is only about a month away.

Because Google bought Dodgeball, I figured I would finally check them out. When I last heard of them, I only got some vague “it's like MySpace, but with cellphones.” It really did not catch my interest at all. This time around, I actually read through the details and FAQ (which was easier to find after signing up than beforehand when I still had a lot of questions to be answered.)

Anyway, it looks quite cool. You and your friends sign up. When you go somewhere and want to announce the fact, you just send an SMS to [city]@dodgeball.com with something like “@sapphire.” It will then text your friends to let you know you are there (in case they want to join). Additionally, any friends-of-friends within a certain number of blocks are also told of your presence (and you of theirs). For the people you may not know (i.e. friends-of-friends and not immediate friends), it can also send pictures as multimedia messages. It also has some functionality like the Google Local SMS–I can text “Crema?” and it will tell me that Crema Bakery and Cafe is at such-and-such cross streets.

So, overall, it is like a location-based MySpace using SMS–everything is face to face instead of sitting around at home on the computer. You use the web to mange things–like friends and adding locations–but the day-to-day usage is all via text message. So far I am quite happy with it.

Posted in: Dear Diary

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