Douglas Rushkoff, an Instructor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program reported over at The Feature, that tonight qualifies as 'launch night' for dodgeball.beta — including the following email in his post:

A few weeks ago we sent around an email about creating a Friendster-like social networking site for use by ITP students. Our thinking was that there are enough ITP students who are interested in social software, that we should have our own friend-of-a-friend data set so we can start building interesting apps. (sites like Friendster & Orkut won't give developers access to their data)

So, we built a Social Networking Service… http://www.dodgeball.com/social
... that is currently powering two projects here at ITP:

dodgeball.com [ Alex and Dennis ]
Alex and Dens' thesis project. "dodgeball.social is like a mobile version of Friendster. Tell us where you are and we'll tell you who's nearby".

SociaLight [ Karen + Mo + Dan + Mike Sharon ]
A project for the Microsoft Design Expo class. "Socialight is a mobile social networking platform which lets you use your phone to find friends, browse profiles and leave messages for them in specific locations."

So to help both of our projects move along, we ask you to please sign up and forward along to your friends. Even though the site is skinned to look like dodgeball, the Design Expo group is currently pulling from our database of users.

The more people who join, the stronger all of our applications will become. :)

Thanks!
- Dens + Alex + Mike + Karen + Dan + Mo

So pass it on! (-:=