Dodgeball's been on my mind, less due to its value proposition and more thanks to the expectations about user attitudes it implies. I think it's neat how the site goes about extending the reach of social networking software into a real-world space. SMS-enabled cellphones were well on the way to becoming little web browsers anyway. GPS technology will soon make the whole process less clunky as well. Soon enough, Dodgeball will be able to determine where its users are without requiring them to "check-in" on a regular basis. As the platform becomes more elegant in turn, maybe it won't be so unusual to see users' real-time locations as Google's first search result.
"Jon Turow is in his apartment."
Spoke brings up some of the same issues by crawling social networks semi-automatically, and it's recently been brought to my attention that LiveJournal posts FOAF profiles for each of its members, the vast majority of whom probably have no idea what FOAF even is.
Privacy's a critical concern here. It's super dangerous for anonymous users to know where I live, let alone where I happen to be at the moment. Pragmatically speaking, information control will be fundamental for social software's long-term viability. Users who can't control access to their information may stop posting anything interesting before long. Dodgeball seems to get some legal and psychological combination of those two points -- "crushes" who haven't agreed to associate with a user are notified when that user is in the area, but the user doesn't get to know where his or her crush happens to be. Users can only define five "crushes" as well. So fine. But pretty much anybody can access this information -- TheFaceBook is more closed than many, for example, and it requires simply that users have been college students at some point beginning about ten years ago (early enough to have an e-mail address, but late enough to still have that e-mail address). Wheelock and St. Bonaventure are among the institutions that qualify.
What's amazing to me is that our generation seems entirely willing to post detailed presence information. Dodgeball's not all that revolutionary in this respect. We have still- and video-cameras on our cell-phones. We've been updating away messages every time we jump in the shower for years. TheFaceBook gets this, I think -- they post users' most recent AIM away messages alongside such other crucial nuggets as users' favorite movies and headshots. We routinely post class schedules and action plans, and many of us have even figured out how to selectively forward missed IMs so that, really, we really don't miss any IMs. This all amidst an architecture explicitly open to anybody with an internet connection -- it takes minutes to register with AIM or any of those other ones.
So maybe we're all ready to advertise where we happen to be at 11:46 PM, as creepy as that may be. Costs and benefits are important considerations here. Again, privacy privacy. Chew on this, too: Ross Mayfield says typical employees take 15 minutes to "recover" full-productivity after a phone call. He references some research that suggests other technologies applied to more closely related/relevant conversation may yield lower "interruption taxes." One supposes this particular argument applies more to exchanging theories on Academici than exchanging "pokes" on TheFaceBook.
I am going to sleep for about eight hours now.
Man, I just assume you're in your apartment unless I hear otherwise. Which is just to say, it's a nice apartment.
Posted by: Josh Eidelson | August 16, 2005 at 10:54 PM