Cities and Networks
If you’ve ever lived in a big city, chances are you know the feeling: You’re walking around downtown with a few hours to spare at the end of the day, and you know that somewhere nearby — perhaps only a few blocks away — there’s a great bar or café that’s packed with interesting people. If it’s your hometown, you might even suspect that a few of your friends, or friends of your friends, are hanging out there. But there’s no easy way to find it, other than by roaming the streets and peering into windows.
This is what economists would call an inefficient market. You have, on the one hand, a service that the city provides: bars and cafés filled with cool people. And you have a buyer willing to pay for that service. Yet most of the time, the buyer ends up schlepping home unsatisfied because there’s no way to connect with the service he seeks.
A pair of tech-savvy twentysomethings named Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert created a solution to this problem. They call it Dodgeball. The service is a mix of social network tools (à la Friendster), simple cell phone messaging, and mapping software.
You sign up for the service and identify other members who are your “friends.” The next time you find yourself with a few hours to spare, you send a text message to Dodgeball specifying your location, and the service sends back a reply notifying you if any friends, or friends of friends, are within 10 blocks of you. Or you can “announce” your own plans. Dodgeball even lets you define “crushes” that have a special weight on the system.
Dodgeball only knows where you are when you choose to announce your presence. You can’t be “seen” by other members until you’ve sent a text message alerting your friends and crushes that you’re at a specific location. So far, the service has been rolled out in 22 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Boston, and Seattle. Earlier this year, Crowley and Rainert announced that they had sold their two-person company to Google — so integration with the popular GoogleMaps feature can’t be far behind.
The ideal environment for Dodgeball is one where there are dozens of potential hangout spots within a few blocks of where you are and thousands of potential people to hang with. It’s easy to imagine the model extended beyond your immediate social network into more narrow needs: Find all the Civil War buffs within 10 blocks of me, or Jungian psychoanalysts, or native Portuguese speakers. Or find me the nearest bowl of vichyssoise, or an available masseuse, or an empty taxi.
Urban theorist Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that, paradoxically, huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. A store selling nothing but buttons most likely won’t be able to find a market in a town of 50,000 people, but in New York City, there’s an entire button-store district. If you have idiosyncratic tastes, you’re much more likely to find someone who shares those tastes in a city of 9 million people.
The small greatly outnumber the large on the Internet as well. Amazon can maintain vast inventories of lesser-known titles because they don’t have the real estate constraints of traditional bookstores and because the Internet makes it so much easier to find the niche readers who will buy those books. The hot buzzword for this trend is “long tail” economics; instead of concentrating exclusively on big mass hits, online businesses can target the long tail of quirkier fare. In the old model, the economics dictated that it was always better to sell a million copies of one album. But in the digital age, it can be just as profitable to sell a hundred copies each of a thousand different albums.
As the technology increasingly allows us to satisfy more eclectic needs, any time those needs require a physical presence — whether it’s sipping your cold soup or meeting your crush in a bar — the logic of the long tail will favor urban environments over less densely populated ones.