Cellphones know where buddies roam

When Shannon Bullard wants to hang out, she doesn't call her friends. She uses her phone as a beacon to broadcast a quick text message about her location: "@ MFA," she reports, when she's not dancing on Lansdowne Street or relaxing at home in Brookline.

Some people show up, others ping back with their locations, and -- if a friend of a friend is close by -- Bullard's phone will receive a message with their photo, name, and a suggestion that they meet.

Within a few minutes, Bullard can instantly pinpoint 25 of her friends through a form of mobile socializing that is evolving rapidly as GPS technology becomes standard in more cellphones. A slew of new programs gives people the option of knowing where their friends are at all times, helping connections that form in the online world blossom into new social networks in the real world.

"We're getting more and more invested in these objects we put in our pockets," said Ted Selker , associate professor in the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works on developing social technologies. "The idea of figuring out how to make the cellphone enhance social engagements is, in some sense, what the phone is about."

Last week , Boost Mobile, a division of Sprint Nextel Corp. , made its friend-tracking service Boost loopt available to 4 million customers, and about 40,000 people nationwide have already signed up, according to the company. Last month, Helio, a joint venture of SK Telecom and EarthLink , began offering its competing Buddy Beacon function that also allows users across the country to track the movement of their friends on cellphone screens.

"Kids these days and their cellphones -- it's crazy," said Jason Uechi , 38, who cofounded Mologogo , a year-old software program that can be downloaded onto a GPS-enabled phone. "It's a part of who you are; it's part of your personality. It's that kind of leap. The cellphone is usurping the computer."

Mobile phones are beginning to play an expanded role because the technology is finally in place. To comply with federal 911 requirements, emergency personnel must be able to locate callers.

Many cellphone companies have met this requirement by building GPS technology, which pinpoints a user's location by using signals from satellites, directly into the phone.

Charles Golvin , principal analyst at Forrester Research, estimated that there are more than 100 million subscribers with GPS technology in their phones in the US, and that roughly 65 million more GPS handsets would be sold this year. Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel now incorporate GPS technology into every new phone, and Cingular currently offers 20 phones with the technology. (Not all GPS-enabled phones are used to broadcast location; some can only provide information for emergency services.)

About 30,000 people have signed up for Mologogo, which shows users as a colored dot hovering over a Google map. Early customers included a pair of guys who spent the past two months hitchhiking to 50 states and used the service to catch rides from people who monitored their progress on a website; Shrewsbury resident Adam Bumpus just uses it as a navigating tool, but has no qualms making his position public.

"If everyone can see where I am, I'd say that's pretty cool," Bumpus wrote in an e-mail.

Bullard, a 23-year-old marketing analyst at Smart Destinations, a Boston-based company that creates technology-based travel products, has been using an early and less-sophisticated version of the concept called Dodgeball to keep tabs on her friends for a year.

The services are all variations on a theme. The more advanced, like Mologogo and Boost loopt, use the phone's GPS capabilities to portray users as little dots on a map of their friends' cellphone screens. Helio's Buddy Beacon uses GPS signal, but depends on users to push a button to update when they want others to know where they are.

Dodgeball takes the most "primitive" track, mass mailing text messages to friends with information about a user's whereabouts.

Some, like Mologogo and Dodgeball, are free programs -- others cost a few dollars a month, while Helio requires all users to own the same $225 phone. Users would also need to pay for their provider's data services in order to use the programs; rates vary by cellphone carrier.

Some companies already offer services that allow parents to track their children, such as Disney Mobile and Sprint's Family Locator. But these new GPS-powered services all raise privacy questions. With parents, lawmakers, and educators already worried about the amount of information that people post on the internet through social networking websites like MySpace.com, including a user's location might make them vulnerable to stalkers, angry former friends, or even strangers that a teenager allows to see their location without thinking of the consequences.

Companies emphasize that users would have to invite or explicitly approve the people who can see their location, and can always go off the map by turning the service off.

Bullard, who says about 25 of her friends use Dodgeball, said it has changed her social life. Now, she knows who shows up when at a bar or other meeting place, and can meet people she didn't already know.

"If a friend of a friend on Dodgeball is a block away, it'll tell you: Susie, a friend of Janice, is nearby -- go and meet them. It's a good tip," she said. But she said she would be a little wary of a service that turned her into a walking dot on a map.

"The way the Internet is being used, and text messaging -- all the technologies are moving forward so fast and sometimes I think the ethics don't catch up with it. Myspace can be a great networking tool, and it can also be dangerous."

Ultimately, proponents think that such services will make the world a friendlier place. People might look at a map on a cellphone and see clusters of familiar dots, invitations to parties, or places their friends like to hang out.

Boost Mobile's loopt service not only allows users to figure out where their friends are; they also allow friends to post their mood, add geotags to mark a place with photos and words, and give off automatic alerts when friends are nearby.

And as the teens and twenty somethings who are the target audience get older, knowing someone's location and status at all times might become the norm, just as people now expect to be able to reach others by cellphone.

"But the future expectation is that the younger user will count on it as they get older," Golvin said.

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.