New York magazine, 2005:

Now that people are breaking up with each other through text messaging, it's only natural that the hottest social-networking program to emerge in recent months is Dodgeball, a free texting service that lets users tell their friends and crushes what bar they're in at any moment so they can meet up. Two recent NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program grads, Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, both 28, launched Dodgeball last spring as an alternative to loud cell-phone calls from bars. When Dodgeball users "check in" at a given locale by sending out a text message, it goes to all their preselected friends, as well as any friends of friends within a ten-block radius. A photo is sent along with the alert-which helps with identifying near strangers. Introductions are made, beer is poured, and then hookups can occur-casually, and in a low-pressure environment, all under the guise of knowing someone in common. It's Friendster, except in real time and in the real world.

(The Friendster comparison proved eerily prescient.)

New York magazine, 2009:

Foursquare is a better Dodgeball, for those who remember the now-defunct social-networking, texting, friend-locating mobile-phone app. The new iteration, rapidly being installed on iPhones across the city, is a fast route to a good night out. Download the app free at playfoursquare.com to track your friends' locations (meaning no more rounds of "Where are you?" texts). It's also a game, with goofy badges awarded to users who check in frequently. And most helpful, members share their ample nightlife experience; according to one enthusiast, the saffron Sazerac at Apotheke is the drink to get.

(Photo by dpstyles)

Some inside the Googleplex believe that Crowley got the code for his new friend-finding startup Foursquare from Dodgeball, the startup he sold to Google for an estimated $40 million in 2005. And after Valleywag reported their suspicions, a source tells us Crowley has been going around telling people at South By Southwest that he did reuse the code, and that he doesn't expect Google will do anything about it.

But that's not what he told Dan Fost of the Los Angeles Times when asked about the charge. Fost credulously printed Crowley's reply:

The code is all brand new. I didn't understand that story. I'm sick as a dog and pasty because I've been holed up for two months writing this stuff.

If only Fost had thought to factcheck that with, say, any of the South By Southwest attendees to whom Crowley confessed. Or with engineers who have inspected Foursquare's code and found elements directly lifted from Dodgeball. That would be work, though — an element curiously missing from much of today's tech journalism.

(Photo by thenextweb)

Watch as microcelebrity NBC contractor Rex Sorgatz attempts to explain Foursquare, a friend-finding interactive game launched by former Google employee Dennis Crowley at the South By Southwest event, an annual excuse for a nonstop party thinly disguised as a conference on all things Web. Carr may be perplexed, but he comes to the right conclusion: Foursquare is a toy for "kids on the Internets."

"Internets," plural! Carr's cool like that!

Sorgatz and Crowley are just two of the familiar microcelebrities who make cameo appearances in Carr's writeup of SXSW. There's Tumblr founder David Karp, bragging about being a slacker:

I didn't even come last year, but this year we dropped the whole team in, I guess as a way of saying that we mean business. We're mostly having fun, doing a few meetings and enjoying seeing old friends. It would probably be a better use of my time to be back home staying up till 4 in the morning and just crushing it to come up with one more application, but this is more fun.

Declaring how much fun one is having and how much work one is avoiding is a strange way of showing one means business, but that's Karp for you.

And look, two Valleywag alumni:

All this can become insular, and fast. On Monday Nick Douglas and Melissa Gira Grant, two veteran bloggers, hosted a session called the "Sex Lives of the Microfamous." The two were involved once, and broke up on Tumblr, or so the story goes.

Actually, I could have sworn those two crazy kids broke up on Valleywag, but what do I know? I'm not quite as old as Carr, but I'm old enough to view faddish kiddie startups like Tumblr and Foursquare with skepticism.

(Video by Richard Blakeley)

Foursquare bears an unmistakable resemblance to Dodgeball, a cell-phone-based friend-finding service Crowley launched in 2004 and sold to Google in 2005 for an estimated $40 million. Crowley worked at Google for two years afterwards. And his former employer may be getting ready to take legal action, if a tipster is right:

The GOOG has reason to believe that the recently launched location-based service startup Foursquare went live using server code that originally powered Dodgeball. A cease and desist order might be sent out to the service as early as this week. An engineer named Harry could also face some additional discipline.

Dodgeball worked by having users check in via text message when they arrived at a location like a bar or restaurant, and broadcast the user's whereabouts to friends — a precursor of Twitter, in some ways, but focused on people's whereabouts. Google ended up killing Dodgeball (a smart move) but launching a similar service called Google Latitude.

Foursquare's added twist: It turns hanging out with friends into an interactive game, with users racking up points for going out. It also has some au courant features, like an iPhone app and integration with Twitter — the kind of thing any Web app needs to be hip these days. But according to an engineer familiar with Foursquare, its back end appears to bear a strong resemblance to Dodgeball's.

Crowley quit Google in 2007, complaining that Google had stifled Dodgeball. One rumor floating around has it that he tried to buy it back from Google, without success. So it makes sense that he would want to relaunch it, and might feel entitled to use the code he wrote, since Google abandoned it.

It also makes sense that he would have help from the inside. The "Harry" the tipster mentioned is almost certainly Harry Heyman, a Google engineer. Heyman was caught by surprise by his employer's announcement of Dodgeball's shutdown. In January, Heyman wrote on his LiveJournal:

Don't fret too much about not having a tool like this to use when dodgeball gets turned off. Like you, I'm pretty unimpressed with most of the other current offerings, but I know of a couple soon-to-be-released things in the works. Keep an eye out, and we'll all find a new home that suits our needs just fine.

But that's the hitch: Google already paid Crowley for the code, and even though it's not being used, Google's lawyers would reasonably want to disabuse startup founders of the notion that they can sell their startup and have it too.

Crowley and Heyman have not yet responded to emails asking for their side of the story. A Google spokeman promised to look into the matter but has not yet offered comment.

Now would be the perfect time to strike, with Crowley at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, surrounded by his friends and fans, many of whom have signed up for Foursquare.

But why? Having taken Google's money for Dodgeball, he gave up the right to have a say in its future. And some startups deserve to die.

Dodgeball enjoyed a brief vogue in 2006 among the early adopters of San Francisco and New York. Quips a person in this set: "Dodgeball died when Twitter took off. Most useful now as a way to see where Andrew Krucoff is getting drunk, or where Rex Sorgatz is getting laid."

For people caught up in the world of Carroll Gardens-to-Mission District microcelebrity, in other words, Dodgeball was a gift. But for Google's hubristic executives, who aim to organize all the world's information, catering to a self-appointed cool-kid set is far too low an ambition. (In 2005, the same year it bought Dodgeball, it also bought a startup called Android; Google is trying to spread the resulting cell-phone operating system into millions of devices.)

Crowley complained that Dodgeball got little support from Google, and noisily quit two years after the sale.

What Crowley, with his entrepreneur's ego, and Dodgeball's self-involved, self-obsessed fans may be too caught up to realize: Google may never have wanted Dodgeball in the first place. Large companies buy smaller ones all the time for a host of reasons: to hire talent, to block rivals from purchasing a company, or even to strangle a threat in the crib. Sometimes, too, they simply make mistakes. (One problem Google has had in integrating startups: Its in-house technology for distributing Web applications across the globe is quirky, and code from outside the Googleplex often requires a complete rewrite before it can work on Google's servers.)

In any event, we're likely to see fewer Dodgeball debacles in Google's future. The market for small Web startups has all but dried up; Google's dealmakers feel less need to swoop in and buy companies lest they go to Microsoft or Yahoo. And Google's informal M&A process, where well-connected early employees could run around with Google's checkbook cutting deals on a whim, is tightening up, we hear. We wonder: Will the Dennis Crowleys of the world be happier if they get to keep their pet projects running, but without Google paying for them?

Acquired in October 2007, Twitter rival Jaiku still doesn't accept new users. Its current ones complain of system slowdowns and malfunctions. On May 30, 2008, founder Jyri Engeström wrote:

Contrary to some voices out there, we DO have plans for future development and we will involve our developer community as much as we can. Just to reiterate, we are working very hard to ensure you have a useful and usable service. We feel the short term pain, too.

Acquired in October 2006, JotSpot is Google Sites now, and according to longtime users, it's not what it used to be.

Purchased in 2005, it took Google six months to assign any new engineers to the project. The founders quit in 2007, and one, Dennis Crowley, will tell any entreprenuer who will listen to reject Google's siren song.

Google acquired GrandCentral, which provides a suite of telephony services, in July 2007, immediately closed it to new users and hasn't opened it since.

Google acquired Measure Map in 2006, hoping to incorporate its features into Google Analytics. "And we did that," reports Google VP David Lawee. Too bad for bloggers who missed Measure Map's blog-specific features and don't use Google's Blogger.

Dodgeball was like Twitter, only instead of saying what you were doing you said where you were. Basically any time you went to a bar or restaurant, you could tell all your friends through Dodgeball, and they could come hang out with you.

The site caught on among Gawker employees, like half of whom are friends of friends with Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley. It also took over a group of techies in San Francisco, a group I joined in early 2006 that included dot-commers, Apple employees, and bloggers.

These crowds aren't just early adopters, they particularly love social technology — anything you can overshare on. So everyone was everyone's Dodgeball buddy, and the site upended our social dynamic. One night, two people Dodgeballing from a bar drew a crowd of thirty. I used Dodgeball to get a ride home when I got mugged.

I also found weird emergent behavior. For example, I wouldn't just keep track of my friends — I kept tabs on my frenemies, so I could more easily avoid them. Crowley supposedly checked in from false locations to keep people off his trail. Friends would get deeply insulted if they were taken off a notification list, and god did the parties get awkward when one person realized they were the only one not getting a text message when their friend walked in the room. I hooked up with a girl because she shoved her phone in my face, showing a friend-of-friend alert from Dodgeball, and said "Is this you?"

Okay, this was just a group of geeks, but that doesn't mean this behavior won't go mainstream. We've learned that from Facebook and (to a lesser extent) Twitter. So why is the iPhone the thing that'll do it?

Like I said, there's the price: The iPhone is now a reasonably affordable phone with a growing user base. It's as cheap as an iPod was when that blew up.

There's Apple's desire to change customer behavior, pushing technological advantages to the public that previously would only attract tech geeks. The iPhone makes people behave differently: They're more apt to pull up web pages (iPhone users download five times the data of normal AT&T users), they treat texts like IM chats, and now they'll assume everyone knows where everyone is.

And maybe, there's Loopt cashing in on this promise by marketing its service and pushing out all competitors. Who knows if they will? Dodgeball just didn't catch on fast enough, and maybe it wasn't just because it required users to remember to text out every time they went to a bar. Maybe it will get hype — like the excited New York Times piece predicting Dodgeball would be the next Friendster — but not major acceptance. Maybe people aren't ready (and some people never will be) to tell everyone where they are. But Facebook and Twitter have already expanded people's view of what's worth sharing with friends, and I think all Loopt has to do is equate itself with the concept of "checking in" from a place. Just like Facebook took over the idea of having an online analogue to your real-world life, and Twitter owns the idea of microblogging (even though dozens of other services have tried and failed to compete).

So what does Loopt do? Same as Dodgeball and Twitter: Say where you are, what you're doing, maybe send a photo. It's a lot of the stuff other sites already do, with the added benefit of pinning all the activity to a place. The company is pitching it as a way to know where your friends are, as often as possible. It will become normal to know, at a glance, where the people you know are. Here's their demo from this morning:

One emergent behavior I expect is the ultra-documented party. Bad enough with camera phones and blogging, but right now if I want to find party photos I need to search around. With Loopt I'll just check everything that happened at one bar on one night.

Has someone ever thought it'd be cute to "stalk" you with a few cameraphone shots on Flickr? (I have!) That'll get a little creepier when they're sending your exact location to the web in real-time.

You know too much about reporter-socialite Julia Allison? Well you're about to know HOW MUCH FUN she's having at that TOTALLY AWESOME PARTY with her CLOSE CLOSE FRIEND MARY. And you'll know it's all happening six blocks away.

And eventually, if you're caught going out for a drink without inviting all your friends, some lonely acquaintance of yours is going to bug you about why they weren't part of the group. Thanks a lot Apple.

The redesign/rebranding is no surprise (unless you thought MyBlogLogs would suffer the fate of many startup acquisitions — either lost in purgatory or a withering death). The new features (a filter for offensive photos and the ability to sign off) are an obvious and necessary improvement since MyBlogLog was suffering from spam and NSFW concerns. Hover features in "Widget 2.0" is merely obligatory Web 2.0 icing.

But all of these efforts are probably for naught. After its initial buzz, MyBlogLog's growth failed to catch on because of spam, scaling issues, and an inability to escape beyond a niche offering. What this new announcement signals is an effort by Yahoo to escape the PR hit that Google suffered in its handling of the Dodgeball acquisition. Whether or not MyBlogLog achieves wider success, Yahoo is sending the message that startups, when acquired, will receive support and attention, will be integrated into the main brand, and will continue to lead a "healthy" and promising life.

Founder Dennis Crowley, frustrated with the utter lack of support he got while trying to develop the service at Google, finally quit Google (along with Dodgeball's other remaining employee) earlier this month. Hey, maybe someone just unplugged the machine and it'll be back up tomorrow. (Yeah right.) But for now, the few hundred geeks who used this service will have to find something else — Twitter, perhaps? — to announce where they're drinking. Hope they raise a glass to this actually useful service, struck down before its prime.

Dodgeball seems like a perfect acquisition. Users "check in" from registered locations to tell their friends where they are. As a result, Dodgeball's system knows where masses of people are (or say they are) at any moment. It seems like a perfect service to integrate with Google Maps, Google Calendar, and other products, but since Google bought Dodgeball last May, little has changed.

Yesterday, though, blogger Chris Messina noticed that Google is integrating Dodgeball accounts with Google/Gmail/Gcal accounts. That's a good step toward really turning Dodgeball into a part of the Google mesh.

Of course, it's scary too. If the contextual ads on Gmail seemed invasive, just imagine how bad they'll get when Google knows you checked in from the strip club last night.

Dodgeball goes Gauth [Factory Joe]
Dodgeball.com [Front page]

• New York-based e-mail startup Daily Candy gets a sweet deal: an investment valuing the company at $130 mil, which lets the company take down its "For Sale" sign and get back to the important business of making urban women feel inadequately shoed. [Gawker, link being fixed]
• So some big-city bloggers had a party for Six Apart's new Vox blogging service, right? And some guys sat in a hot tub on the roof? And probably someone called this the bubble? Hon, it's not a bubble until what's in the hot tub can get you drunk. Anyway, click through for topless shots of Gawker Media managing editor Lockhart Steele. [Teen Drama]
• Damn it, Gawker's stealing all the tech news today. As our catty sister notes, the New York Times is proud to name-drop Dodgeball.com founder Dennis Crowley, the man responsible for every New Yorker and San Franciscan constantly updating their friends on how drunk they're about to get. [Gawker]
• Pictured: The Times also uses a photo illustration to remind everyone of those wild days of free drink coasters for all. [NYT]
• Mooching off the "Get a Mac" commercials: You can make a clever parody or a creepy knock-off ad. (Please make the parody.) [iLoad]

• Premature geolocation: Unasked-for proliferation of location-aware services such as Dodgeball, Plazes, Meetro, Placesite, Platial, and porn banner ads ("Find hot chicks in SAN MATEO")
• Evil: A social construct transcended by the ubermensch, who constructs his own morality and, through the will of power, imposes it on humanity. Sources: Nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche and Google co-founder Sergey Brin
• Skeptimistic: Waffling in a review, unwilling to trash a product (lest the launch goes huge and the reviewer doesn't get invited to the IPO party), but unwilling to extol it (to keep the competition inviting the reviewer to their parties). TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington (the Skeptimystic) is running out of skeptimism and has lately delegated reviews to newer, more ambivalent writers.