# Dodgeball (2000 – 2009)

- URL: https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/startup-graveyard/dodgeball/
- Sector: Social media
- Country: United States
- Total funding: unknown
- Cause of closure: Acquired and shut down

## What did it do?

Dodgeball was a location-based social network built for mobile devices. Users told the service where they were by text message, and it let them know about nearby friends, friends of friends, people they were interested in and interesting places. It was founded by Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, students at New York University.

## Why did it shut down?

Google bought Dodgeball in May 2005 for an undisclosed sum, but the service never got the integrations people expected. The founders left Google in April 2007, and Crowley described his experience there as extremely frustrating. In 2007 TechCrunch wrote that the acquisition had largely come to nothing. In January 2009 Google announced that it would close Dodgeball within a few months, and in February 2009 the service gave way to Google Latitude.

## The story

Before smartphones and app stores existed, Dodgeball users told the service where they were with a text message. Shortly afterwards a message would arrive on their phones letting them know that friends, friends of friends and people they liked were nearby. It was one of the first examples of what we now know as location-based social apps.

Dodgeball was born out of New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP); its founders, Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, were students there. When a user checked in somewhere with a registered phone, friends nearby were notified, and those who wanted to could arrange to meet. Over time the service became available in 22 US cities, from Seattle to Miami and from Boston to Denver.

In May 2005 Google bought Dodgeball for an undisclosed sum. Engadget wrote that day that the service was practically begging to be merged with Google's mobile maps and local search. The expected integration never came. Crowley and Rainert left Google in April 2007; Crowley described his experience at the company as extremely frustrating. That same year, announcing that Google had bought the Finnish microblogging service Jaiku, TechCrunch noted that the Dodgeball acquisition had largely come to nothing.

In January 2009 Vic Gundotra, Google's vice-president of engineering, announced that Dodgeball.com would be closed within a few months and the service would no longer be available. The same farewell post on Google's developer blog also covered changes to Jaiku's future. Dodgeball closed in February 2009 and was replaced by the location-sharing service Google Latitude; Latitude itself was shut down in 2013.

The most striking part of the story came afterwards. After leaving Google, Crowley founded Foursquare with Naveen Selvadurai in 2009 and carried the check-in idea into the smartphone era. For years Foursquare kept as its core product the location-based sharing idea that Dodgeball had left unfinished. Dodgeball's lesson is that being acquired is not always a safe harbour for a product: when the buyer's priorities change, even a good idea can be left forgotten on the shelf.

## Lessons

- When selling to a large company, ask for written commitments on the product roadmap, team resources and decision-making authority; otherwise the product can join the queue and be forgotten.
- An idea shelved by its acquirer is not necessarily wrong; Crowley brought the same location and check-in idea back to life with Foursquare.
- A product held back by the limits of technology can be tried again once the infrastructure matures; keep watching for the moment the market is ready.

## Sources

- [Dodgeball (service)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgeball_(service))
- [Google buys Dodgeball](https://www.engadget.com/2005/05/12/google-buys-dodgeball/)
- [Where Are You? Show 'Em With Google Latitude](https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/where-are-you-show-em-with-google-latitude/)