We R @ Star Shoes, send reinforcements

The website www.dodgeball.com offers nothing about the new Ben Stiller movie, nor anything related to that merciless childhood sport, but it’s still hitting the mark for its circle of social networkers.

Let’s play. Say, you’re at Star Shoes on some Friday night and you’re just not feeling the crowd. Need some reinforcements, huh? E-mail Dodgeball with a text message -- like “@Star Shoes” -- and Dodgeball will then send a text message to all your friends in a 10-block radius (perhaps they’re at the Room, Nacional or Boardner’s, whatever) indicating that you’re just a mildly drunken stagger away.

Or, say you have a good suspicion that some of your friends are hanging out close by, but they didn’t tell you. With a different function, Dodgeball can tell you which of your friends are in the same radius without letting them know that you’re snooping.

Of course, none of this works until you and your friends sign up at Dodgeball.com, which brings us to the inevitable moment of our era’s friends-ied obsessions. “As soon as we dropped the Friendster model on top of Dodgeball,” says Dennis Crowley, founder and CEO, “it started to make sense to a lot of people.”

Yes, on the Dodgeball site, you can assemble your circle of friends, which then gives you access to your friends’ friends. (Dodgeball doesn’t let you go beyond two degrees of separation.) Dodgeball can also filter certain friends from receiving your text messages; say you’ve accepted an invitation from your idiot co-worker to maintain an amicable work environment, but you really don’t want him cramping your style outside the office.

But if you don’t give a fig about today’s network fussiness, there’s still a pretty useful feature: Punch in “El Rey?” into your cellphone and Dodgeball will respond with the address and cross streets for El Rey.

“As much as we’ve been called ‘the Friendster for mobile phones,’ we’re really completely different,” Crowley says. “We built Dodgeball as a social networking tool that you can use when you’re actually being social, not when you’re sitting at home in front of your PC.”

Case in point: Dodgeball has a feature that allows you to compile a “crush list” of fellow users. If someone on this list checks in within a 10-block radius of where you’ve checked in, Dodgeball will notify you and the person you’ve been modestly stalking.

There are certainly some obstacles in Dodgeball’s overall reach, so don’t bet on its coming anywhere near Friendster’s 7.5 million users anytime soon. “I have tried to get my friends to do it,” says Robert Puckett, 23, who has friends on both coasts. “You would think that the site would appeal to most of your Friendsters. The problem is not everyone is a huge texter.”

Americans just aren’t as text-messaging happy as people in other parts of the world. Andre Sevigny, vice president of business development for the mobile marketing firm Enpocket, says it’s not because of culture or economics; limited text-messaging functions on some phones and the lack of interconnectivity between American carriers have been the real culprits.

But Sevigny says things are changing. His company’s research shows that more than one-third of America’s 157 million mobile users actively text message, and its use spikes to 57% among 18- to 24-year-olds. He also says that 12% of mobile users actively send and receive photos, important in Dodgeball’s meet-and-greet culture.

“Once people understand how to do it, we’ll see a viral spread of text messaging,” Sevigny says. “Simply because if your family or friends send you a message, you’ll want to find a way to send a message back.”

Dodgeball is catching on fairly well in New York City, where the bulk of the site’s nearly 7,000 registered users live (the newest Dodgeball cities include Seattle; Austin, Texas; and Washington, D.C.). It’s not too surprising that fewer than 1,000 are from Los Angeles, according to Crowley. Says frustrated Dodgeballer Amy Wang, 27, “With the way L.A. is geographically laid out, I think Dodgeball is a much tougher sell here.”

Good point -- outside of a few bar-hopping strips around Hollywood and West Hollywood, since when in L.A. was one part of your evening 10 blocks away from the next? Unlike the sidewalk explorers of lower Manhattan, this is how we kick it: You make plans to go out, you drive 20 to 60 minutes to your destination and meet up with the friends you expected to see because you had told them of your plans.

“Getting in a car and heading 20 minutes away is a much greater commitment than walking out my door and heading two blocks north,” acknowledges Crowley, who lives in New York. “The Dodgeball experience may not be identical in every city, but there’s no doubt that our users get what we’re trying to do.

“A lot of it is tweaking the application on a city-by-city basis. Ten blocks is a great filter in New York, but maybe we should increase it to one mile in L.A.”

How about 10 miles? (Everyone forgets the Valley.)

Tommy Nguyen can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.