Dodgeball for Nerds
Let’s say you’re working late on a Friday night on some top-secret project and you can’t really head out for the night at the same time the rest of your friends do. They make their way to one of your various local hangouts, but realize that the crowd there is boring so they decide to go somewhere else. While they could call and let you know where to meet them, there’s a much more entertaining (and by entertaining, I mean geekier) way to let you know. They dodgeball you!
Dodgeball, up and running in 22 cities including the Twin Cities, is based on a text messaging system through your cell phone. From the site’s FAQs: “We’ll ping your friends with your whereabouts, let you know when friends-of-friends are within 10 blocks, allow you to broadcast content to anyone within 10 blocks of you or blast messages to your groups of friends.”
You can find out where your friends are, let them know where you’ll be in a couple of hours, or even just find the address to any of the local venues that other Dodgeball users have already added to the online database. The site includes user-reviews and a ranking system of the top users in each city. Overall, Minneapolis ranked #4 in activity for the month of September.
Within the past few days, it’s become even easier for people to sign in, using their Google account information. How much easier could it get to keep constant tabs on all of your geeky friends? It’s definitely worth checking out.
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I saw this announced a while ago, but I figured it’d be one of those things that catches on in bigger, cooler cities and never really catches on here. But we’re #4, eh? That’s neat.
Oooohhhh…. this is crack. CRACK, I tell you.