Stealth startup Hyphen-8 has been beta testing their new mobile social network called Lime Juice in San Francisco since October.

Using your phone to create or enhance real world interactions is a killer application, but no one has cracked the nut yet. The reason is that the network is useless until it achieves a critical mass of users who are online and using the application via their mobile phone. If no one else is online, there’s little point in you being online, either. And presence detection is another (technical) problem. Even if people have joined the network, how do you know when they are near you?

But once it does happen, look out. You could be in a bar and see who’s single, who thinks you’re cute, who wants to talk to you, etc. (if they choose to share that information). Forget meeting via an online dating site and then organizing an awkward in person meeting that usually falls flat. Instead, you can do the online an real world thing simultaneously.

We’ve kept an eye on the new startups launching in this space. Check out Rummble, Mig33, ZYB, Mocospace, Aka-Aki, Nokia Sensor, Dodgeball, Mobiluck, MeetMoi and Imity, just to get warmed up. But none of them yet have critical mass (Mig33, however, is turning into a very large cheap VOIP provider on the side).

LimeJuice now joins the group with a unique product. Users can actually join on the fly, via SMS. And the company is sponsoring party after party at bars and clubs in San Francisco to get users to try out the product with lots of others at the same time. The test results are encouraging – people are using it. A lot.

How It Works

The goal is to allow people in a bar or other social gathering to learn a little about the people around them, and flirt via the mobile network as a way to break the ice. The details are what makes LimeJuice interesting. It’s dead simple to join and use.

First, users can register for the service via SMS. That means if just one person in a bar is a member or even knows about the service, they can tell others and quickly get a core group to join. When you create an account, you tell it something distinctive about yourself (tall blonde, red dress!) so that people searching will be able to quickly know who you are. When you go to another event later on, you simple update the description for the evening).

Second, all of the key interaction (for now) happens via SMS. So every phone is ready to go. No need to download a java app or even go to a web page. Just send a text message to the service along with the identifier of the person you want to talk to (which you can get via search), and the message is sent to them.

Third, even though people are using the service to send text messages back and forth, phone numbers are not exchanged. LimeJuice sits in the middle, and you can block someone easily.

Beta Events

LimeJuice has seen a good level of participation at the handful of events they’ve sponsored. An average of 40-50 people participate per event. They spend about 1.5 hours each using the service over the course of the evening and average ten text messages sent per person (some people send as many as 180 text messages). At one event, over 2,500 messages were sent to the service from participants.

For now the company will continue to sponsor events in San Francisco, hopefully building up a core user base that will begin to spread out and get others to join. If/when they get a lot of people in San Francisco to use the service, they’ll then expand to other cities.

The company, founded by Tobin Van Pelt and John Garrett, is based in San Francisco and has four employees. They’ve self funded to date with $100,000 and are currently pitching for a Series A round of funding.

Google Accounts were integrated into dodgeball.com — a company Google acquired back in May 2005 that allows users with cell phones to notify their friends via text messages (SMS) as to what bar or restaurant they currently are at (and thus where their friends can meet them for a drink).

Earlier this week, Google Mobile, which is Google’s search engine for cell phones, revealed public testing of Google Ads in their search results. Google is obviously getting all their ducks in a row as they get serious about tackling local advertising and expanding their advertising services to other platforms, particularly mobile devices. dodgeball.com is the perfect service for both local and national advertisers to get in front of people at the point of purchase (whether it’s beer, liquor, local bar happy hour specials, or local Italian restaurants).

Since purchasing the company, Google has done relatively nothing with dodgeball.com, other than provide it with its own 5-digit SMS shortcode. Prior to the shortcode, they were operating using cell phone email addresses, which is a cost-effective (free!) method that a mobile-based start-up can use to get off the ground. Alternatively, text messages being sent through a SMS gateway can cost a mobile-based company anywhere from $0.03 – $0.05 per inbound (”MO”, mobile originated) and outbound (”MT”, mobile terminated) text message. Unfortunately, most users don’t understand that they can send/receive emails as text messages using their cell phone and only incur standard text messaging fees, without any added data fees from their cell carrier. I believe the high costs required for a company to operate a standard 5-digit SMS code has attributed to why the U.S. has lagged in mobile text messaging adoption behind Europe and Japan. I am unsure of how many cell phone models and cell carriers can send/receive emails as standard text messages, but would sure be curious to know.

Marshall Kirkpatrick reviewed a number of other SMS services last month.

More on this story at TailRank and a very interesting post by Chris Messina.

The DEMO conference is wrapping up here in San Diego and unlike when it began 16 years ago the conference wasn’t dominated by mobile launches. None the less, there were some very interesting mobile services here like ScanR and Realeyes3D image scanning by mobile photo, Flurry’s simple email and RSS on Java phones and Grand Central (which I’ve written about at length).

3Jam and Pinger both launched multiperson SMS services at DEMO. Probably first popularized by Dodgeball, multiperson SMS is a feature (or a company – your call!) that quite a few people are coming out with all at once lately. The following are some short descriptions of eight companies offering multiperson SMS and a table displaying which services offer particular features.

The List

• Jyngle is a web based service that has voice support, just launched and got a review over on CrunchGear today.
• 3Jam is funded, relatively straight forward and launched here at DEMO.
• Pinger lets users quickly respond to messages by voice and received $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in 2005.
• Swarmteams does a whole lot of things, though we weren’t able to get it to work well in testing for our original review. You might have better luck, and if so then this Irish service could well be worth using.
• Loopt is a location aware service funded by YCombinator and Sequoia. We reviewed it at launch.
• Dodgeball is old school and was acquired by Google in 2005.
• Twitter is for groups of friends who want varying levels of instant, automatic updates on each others’ activities. It’s a product of podcasting company Odeo.
• Moblabber is a mobile social network that users can receive topical messages from automatically.

There are undoubtedly more companies that offer multi-person SMS, or at least there will be by the time I click publish on this post – but I hope that comparing these seven company’s by feature set will help flesh out a vision of the landscape and where we stand today.

The Features