Dodgeball (service)

Dodgeball

The Dodgeball logo from the website
Genre	Social networking
Fate	acquired by Google in 2005
Successor	Google Latitude
Founded	2000
Founder(s)	Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert
Defunct	Shut down in February 2009
Key people	Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert
Owner(s)	Google

Dodgeball was a location-based social networking software provider for mobile devices. Users text their location to the service, which then notifies them of crushes, friends, friends' friends and interesting venues nearby.^[1] Google acquired Dodgeball in 2005 and discontinued it in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude.

Overview

Dodgeball was founded in 2000 by New York University students Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert. The company was acquired by Google in 2005.^[2] In April 2007, Crowley and Rainert left Google, with Crowley describing their experience there as "incredibly frustrating".^[3] After leaving Google, Crowley created a similar service known as Foursquare with the help of Naveen Selvadurai.^[4]

Dodgeball was available for the cities of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis–St. Paul and Denver.^[1]

In January 2009 Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering at Google, announced that the company would "discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available."^[5] Dodgeball was shut down and succeeded in February 2009 by Google Latitude.^[6]

See also

• Location-based service
• Mobile dating
• Geosocial Networking
• Foursquare (service)

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Dodgeball website
2. ^ Polytechnic University paper
3. ^ Flickr blog
4. ^ foursquare
5. ^ "Changes for Jaiku and Farewell to Dodgeball and Mashup Editor". Google Code Blog. January 2009. http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/01/changes-for-jaiku-and-farewell-to.html. 
6. ^ Where Are You? Show ‘Em With Google Latitudem The New York Times blog, 4 February 2009.

External links

• Dodgeball