First Experiences with Dodgeball.com
Dodgeball.com is a fairly simple idea: whenever you go somewhere to hang out, you send a message to the dogeball.com service, and then if any of your friends are in the vicinity, it will tell you and you can hook up.
So I finally decided to try it out, and signed up yesterday.
So far, I’m unimpressed. Nice idea; poor implementation. This is definitely a tool that is suited for only a narrow subset of geeks (in Seattle, it looks mostly alumni of NWRaves); not general population.
- NONE of my venues are in there. Having to maually enter venues, when they exist on hundreds of other ratings and reviews sites, is lame. How can we make venue data a common shared resource, so sites like dodgeball can crawl it? Supporting adr, is a good start.
- Manually re-enter your friends again. I already did this for Orkut. Both tools are owned by Google. WTF?
- Usability: When you manually add an entry, and hit submit, you don’t have any opportunity to correct typos. You just have to e-mail and ask them to correct the venue name. Some links just don’t work. Not too intuitive: there is “prefs”, “profile”, and “manage” — which does which? When you do search, and it doesn’t find the venue, then correct the name (e.g. Shiro/Shiro’s), it adds the new name, it doesn’t search again.
- No easy way to switch cities. At least, not that I could tell. The assumption seems to be that you live your dodgeball life in one city, where my assumption woul be that you are more interested in serendipity when travelling.
- Check-in is to an e-mail address, not SMS. That doesn’t make sense to me. Doesn’t that cut out a whole pool of people who can vote for American Idol but now can’t register at dodgeball?
- When you sign up, it doesn’t automatically add the friend who invited you. That took me a day to figure out. Nice.
- When I finally tried to check-in at a venue, it sent me back an e-mail saying “you must first register with Dodgeball”. So I still haven’t been able to use it. Yes, I am registered with the right e-mail. Too bad.
I suppose that for people who take the time to enter their circle of friends, and get past the initial hurdles, it’s good for finding parties and finding friends at the lounges. But that’s a pretty small demographic. I was expecting something a bit more accessible to broader population.