Many social networks offer mobile features, but an emerging field of social networks is designed with the cell phone as the hub. The most practical use of these services appears to involve friends keeping friends apprised of their bar-hopping locations via SMS messages or a phone Web browser so that they can join in the revelry.
Dodgeball, the brainchild of two New York University grad students, provides just such a cell-based location service. After creating a Dodgeball account (by providing your name, city, phone number, and wireless carrier), you start adding friends: Dodgeball detects and sends invites to your Gmail contacts, or you can search the directory of other Dodgeball members. When you hit your favorite saloon and you want your buddies to drop by, you simply send a text message to Dodgeball's SMS code containing the @ symbol and the venue name--a "check-in" in mobile social networking parlance. Dodgeball then fires off a text message to your friends declaring the same (frequent Dodgeball users had better be on an unlimited-text-messaging plan). Other shorthand codes send announcements ("shout-outs") or retrieve venue locations from Google Maps. Dodgeball's main drawback (other than its party focus) is that currently its coverage is limited to just 22 major U.S. cities. Here's hoping that Google, which recently acquired Dodgeball, will soon take steps to expand the service's reach.
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