Dodgeball (service)

Dodgeball

Genre	Social networking
Fate	acquired by Google in 2005
Successors	Google Latitude, Foursquare
Founded	2000
Founder	Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert
Defunct	Shut down in February 2009
Key people	Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert
Owner	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. Google acquired Dodgeball in 2005 and discontinued it in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude.

Overview

Dodgeball was founded in 2003 by New York University students Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert. The company was acquired by Google in 2005. In April 2007, Crowley and Rainert left Google, with Crowley describing their experience there as "incredibly frustrating". After leaving Google, Crowley created a similar service known as Foursquare with the help of Naveen Selvadurai.

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.

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." Dodgeball was shut down and succeeded in February 2009 by Google Latitude. Google Latitude was shut down in 2013.

See also

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

External links

• Dodgeball (archive)

1. REDIRECT Template:Google LLC

• Polytechnic University paper
• Flickr blog
• foursquare
• Where Are You? Show ‘Em With Google Latitude m The New York Times blog, 4 February 2009.