SMess

(I spent as long troubleshooting the formatting on this entry as I did writing it. Blast you, WordPress! So this entry isn’t totally done, but I’ve gotta go to bed.) 

I subscribe to an SMS social networking service called Dodgeball (now owned by Google). It’s a blindingly-simple service which, mostly (there are a few more features under the hood), allows you to send one text-message to a predefined group of your friends (as long as they’re also on Dodgeball). You can either tell them where you are (the service is tied in to Google Maps), or sending them a generic message (“Anyone want to go see the Bodies exhibit?”). You can control the messages you send out (select a subgroup of your audience, or eliminate certain folks from your dodge broadcast). 

Dodgeball Games 

Dodgeball is a fun, strange little toy that different members can use in a myriad of different ways. This year, for example, the Seattle Cacophony Society used it to organize a mob of 200 drunk Santas during our Santarchy event. 

On a social level, you can use Dodgeball to organize informal social events on a whim. I send out a text saying “I’m at Café Zoka’s, studying,” and anyone who feels like casually dropping by can do so. The framing of the message creates a very different tone than a phoned, 1-on-1 invite, removing the mild social strain of having to say “no” or provide an excuse if the person on the other end of the line doesn’t feel like joining you. It allows you to create an open, informal, communal space wherever you are at any given moment.

Secondary Side Effects: Social Networks = Social Weirdness 

In practice, though Dodgeball is a strange and complicated social commitment. As Howard Rheingold recently posted (r.e. a talk by Danah Boyd): social networking technologies add a new layer to relationships by making them public and explicit. Everyone who browses your profile on Dodgeball can see how many friends you have and who they are. As with other social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace, this creates a subtle but driving social pressure to accrue as many public friends as you can get. In a digital world where Technorati rates the authority of blogs by how many folks are linking to them, popularity defines validity.

On the other hand, who do you really want to indiscriminately invite to your spontaneous snowball fight in the park at 9 pm on a Wednesday? Before you send that invite… Who, again, is on your Dodgeball list? Are there any people in that mix who are currently having tension, or whose invite you’ve only accepted out of politeness? How much has the internal landscape of your social network changed in the last 24 hours?  

So you’ve got to think before you send your Dodge.

… And Social Weirdness Determines Message Content 

Because the nature of the tool leads, necessarily, to the creation of large, randomized, and infrequently-tuned groups, the messages that one sends to those groups remain basically shallow and as infrequent. If you have 20 friends, and they each send a Dodge a day, annoyance wins out over utility, and you or your friends will drop the service—so, if you know what’s good for you, you shut yer yap.  

In other words, the nature of the Dodgeball tool enforces primarily utilitarian, actionable communications. I’m at [x]. Do you want to be at [x]? 

I recently stumbled across an article about a Dodgeball-style SMS service called FriendsTribe that, if I’m reading it right, allows users to define a wider geographic radius for text message broadcasts. This got me thinking: what if we used social network-based broadcast SMS tools like this to communicate over large distances (DistantDodge)? Why would anyone want to send or receive Dodge-style SMS messages outside of an actionable geographic radius?  

• Plus: because brief, low-bandwidth, realtime communication can contribute to the feeling of being tuned into the diurnal rhythms of your favorite peoples’ lives. It’s like seeing your friends’ IM presence information (away, busy, available, offline). Even though we didn’t IM today, I know when my best friend in Texas went to bed tonight, because I saw him go offline in Google Talk. It made me feel in tune with him. SMS could build on this basic visceral, realtime sense of one another by adding content. 
• Minus: SMS is intrusive, whereas presence info is passive. There is definitely such a thing as too many SMS messages, and what’s more, some information is—maybe— too significant for SMS. 
• Interesting: The increased radius would probably make you much more cautious about who you include, and would define the content of your message. If I had this tool, I would include only my five best friends, or my immediate family members. I would also be bound by location and time zone differences to only communicate non-actionable or semi-actionable information.

Consider these three types of non-actionable messages: 

1. Very significant personal notifications: (“I got the job!” = rare)
2. Somewhat significant things: (“I’m having a bad day, somebody cheer me up” = moderate)
3. Silly, random things: (“How many Carl Sagans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” * = all day long, every day)

Would it be appealing to use Dodgeball-like tools to broadcast/receive non-actionable information (so, personal information) back and forth over distances with the people you like the most? If so, what sorts of information would you want flying back and forth?  

* “Billions and billions”

Advertisement