Anthony M. Townsend - Smart Cities - Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

With the e-mail switchboard in place, Crowley and Rainert turned to work on another hack that would provide the glue to turn Dodgeball into a bona fide social network—a new kind of digital behavior they dubbed the “check-in.” As Crowley sarcastically describes it, the check-in offered “a way to globally broadcast your location to all of your other laid-off friends.”19 He and Rainert developed a clever coding system to minimize the effort required. Sending an e-mail with “@Tom and jerry” would check you into Tom & Jerry’s on Elizabeth Street, the dive around the corner from ITP that became the duo’s informal briefing room for reporters and investors. You could also shout a message that would be delivered via wireless e-mail (and later SMS) along with a notice of your check-in to your friends—say, “(2>Tom and jerry! happy hour is on.”20

Dodgeball hit the downtown scene like a new drug, and the check-ins started flooding in. The party-prone “kids” Crowley had collected like Friendster friends at Jupiter, Vindigo, and a brief stint at MTV became Dodgeball’s most active users. Last night’s mayhem became transcribed forever into a database. Blogs told tales of blackout-inducing binges that could only be recalled through a perusal the next morning of the check-in tailings on Dodgeball.com. “Then we got our first blog post on Gizmodo, and then at that point Newsweek and Time Magazine were looking at the blogs for stories to write,” he recalls. Dodgeball spread virally and Crowley and Rainert spun it out of the university as a for-profit venture. From the three hundred or so students and friends who used the service during their grad school days, membership expanded to a thousand at the new startup’s launch. Within a year, over thirty thousand people had logins.

As Dodgeball became a virtual dashboard for a certain slice of Manhattan’s digerati, its social graph—the web of friendships recorded in its database, and the flow of check-ins its users created—formed a new kind of urban media that Crowley and Rainert eagerly employed to design new experiences. One tweak tried to help you make new friends. Normally you only saw the check-ins of your direct friends, but if a friend of a friend checked in nearby, you’d get an alert urging you to go say hi. Another experiment turned Dodgeball into a romantic matchmaking machine, letting you declare a “crush” on another user and alerting him or her when you checked in nearby, to give you a shot at a hookup.

Dodgeball was a tantalizingly valuable piece of digital real estate, which Crowley likened to the Marauder’s Map from the 1999 best-seller Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. A magical atlas, the map used little dots to track the location of Potter’s fellow students at Hogwarts in real time. When the book’s film version debuted in May 2004, it instantly gave Crowley a visual vocabulary to explain Dodgeball’s potential to investors. In a short time, word spread to the West Coast, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin took a shine to it, acquiring the fledgling start-up in May 2005.

Dodgeball’s impact on the subsequent development of the mobile web was profound. With nothing but a phone keypad, rudimentary mobile e-mail, and a perfunctory patois of symbols and place-names, Crowley and Rainert inspired other hackers to cobble end runs around walled gardens. Conversely, the service helped pave the way for the app market by showing the wireless industry the huge demand for new software on mobiles. For nascent social networks, it highlighted how important and tricky location would be, but also proposed some creative solutions to the problems that cropped up, including the dreaded “ex-girlfriend problem” (which should be self-explanatory). Dodgeball showed how social software could be with us everywhere, and be fun without being annoying.

Crowley himself is an archetype for smart-city hackers everywhere. Urban economists believe that cities thrive because they create opportunities for people to interact for commerce, learning, and entertainment. But it takes someone who intuitively understands cities to create a new way of doing that for the whole world to use. Jane Jacobs’s treatise of good urbanism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities , was a love letter to New York City’s Greenwich Village, the same neighborhood that both inspired and accommodated Crowley as he conceived Dodgeball. The book glorified how good streets create opportunities for people to meet by chance. Crowley designed Dodgeball as an engine to amplify that serendipitous potential, by constantly prodding us to get up and go make new friends. If she were still alive, how would Jacobs have judged Dodgeball? Trotted out against the best new ideas in urban design, I think the humble check-in might beat them all.

“Pie in the Sky”

By the summer of 2002, another technology was generating buzz among smart-city hackers all over the world, but especially in New York. While Crowley was working on Dodgeball across town, I was busy marshaling a ragtag army of tinkerers, open source believers, and wireless enthusiasts. NYCwireless, as we called ourselves, held its monthly communion on the first Tuesday of every month. The meetings began in the early evening with demos and discussions about new wireless gadgets. They ended, as often as not, well past midnight over beers at a downtown bar. Around tables strewn with empty glasses and bottles, a dozen or more geeks would stay up late making plans to spread free networks throughout the city. Bike messenger bags stuffed with wireless routers, antennas, and patch cables lay underfoot.

One of those nights, I actually ended up in a bar fight wielding nothing but a surplus military laptop. My partner in this crusade to light up Manhattan with public Internet service was Terry Schmidt, an engineer who was fascinated by wireless networks and mobile computing. If I was the community organizer at the heart of this nascent free wireless movement, Schmidt was the mad scientist, pushing the technology to see if it could survive the mean streets of Manhattan.

A month earlier, I had met my weapon of choice for the first time. Schmidt was standing in a light drizzle on Fifth Avenue near the Flatiron Building. We were on our way to pitch a new wireless hot-spot project to a potential sponsor. He beamed as I walked up, and wiped a slick mist off his Panasonic Toughbooks screen with his sleeve. “Its ruggedized,” he explained, “milspec ... rubber gaskets to keep dirt and sand out. Glare-resistant screen. I got it from a liquidator for $400.” Tapping into an unsecured hot spot in one of the offices overhead, Schmidt and his city-proof computer were a vision of the future. I held the compact but dense case, feeling like a supporting cast member in some cyberpunk novel. I had to have one. I ordered it that night.

At the bar that night, Schmidt was in my face, shrieking madly, “Lets smash the Toughbooks together! I want to test the cases!” Winding up, we swung the laptops together as others cheered us on like it was some kind of geek grudge match. Much to everyone’s surprise, the Toughbooks were truly tough, and survived repeated collisions without shedding any flimsy pieces. As the bartender’s shouts to knock it off cut through the fog of war, Schmidt sat down, flipped up his lid, and smiled as his Linux operating system happily ran through its start-up sequence without a glitch. Drinking beer and banging expensive toys around was a fun way to pass the time. But the abuse that Schmidt unleashed onto that laptop was serious business. The fieldwork of lighting up a city one hotspot at a time was going to take a brutal toll, and he wanted dependable tools. The Toughbooks had earned his approval.

Deploying Wi-Fi throughout the world has taken the better part of a decade. Today, almost everywhere you might want to open your laptop and check e-mail, there’s a hot spot for you to hop onto. You just assume that the cafe, library, or airport terminal has a wireless connection, although sometimes you might need a passcode or have to pay a modest fee to use it. In the late 1990s, there was growing excitement about mobile computing, but no network infrastructure to support it. Wireless carriers were just starting to build out mobile broadband networks. That would slow to a snail’s pace after the telecom industry bubble popped in 2000.