This past few weeks have left my cellphone buzzing like it was in an epileptic fit every few minutes. The reason: Dodgeball. But before I go into that, let me explain to you what Dodgeball is. It occurred to me after reading Jasmeet’s entry, that a lot of you readers may be wondering what the heck he’s referring to. Dodgeball, in short, is this texting service that lets you know where your friends are. You “dodgeball” by sending a short text message to the Dodgeball server letting them know where you are, and all your friends will then receive a message saying something like “Nicole L. at Metreon (4th and Mission)” or something to that effect. It’s an easy way for friends to get in touch with others, especially when you’re pub-hopping or just hanging out at night.

And the thing is, Dodgeball works. I’ve heard stories where friends who just happened to be in the same neighborhood got together because of a Dodgeball message. Example: I was at the Palace Hotel one evening after a geek/blogger dinner, and received a Dodgeball text from my friend MJ saying that she was in House of Shields, which happened to be across the street. So I dropped by, and we found each other. And thus the magic of Dodgeball. You can also do things like broadcast a message to your friends, as well as find a venue’s location.

One could argue that you could do the same thing by just mass-SMSing to a bunch of friends. True, but time-consuming. I have about 15 or so friends on my Dodgeball list, and it would be way too much trouble to SMS all of them letting them know where I am. With Dodgeball, all I have to do is text “@venue”, and send it off. The only problem I’ve had with it so far, is that sometimes certain venues aren’t listed in the Dodgeball database, which kinda ruins the whole thing.

But back to the first bit of my cellphone going into epileptic fits. I guess there have been way more events going around town in the past couple weeks than I realize, because I was getting dodgeball messages like crazy. And a lot of the time, it was simply unnecessary: I already KNEW all my friends were at this place, I didn’t need to have a text message telling me that. I think I just need to know when to text “off” to stop the Dodgeball avalanche.