Google, the publicly held Mountain View, CA firm best known for its search engine, has acquired dodgeball, a social networking tool for mobile urbanites and one of the earliest examples of mobile social software.
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Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert were students of mine at ITP. I’ve watched them build Dodgeball over the last few years, which was both inspiring and instructional. Given the level of thought and effort they’ve put into it, this is really good news, for them and for Google.
More to say later, but the important thing now is that Dodgeball adds to a really interesting set of ‘sand in the oyster’ issues for Google. Google has historically been information-centric. The content and character of social relations don’t fit well into that view of the world, but matter, a lot, to users. (As we’ve often said around here, community != content.)
Gmail, Orkut, and now Dodgeball all touch this issue. Dodgeball in particular is built on a mix of three different kinds of maps: maps of location (118 rivington St), maps of place (a bar called The Magician), and maps of social environment (“I’m here. Where are my friends?”) By mixing them, Dodgeball mingles informational and social aspects of a user’s life into something more valuable than either of those things in isolation.
As Brewster Kahle says ‘If you want to solve, hard problems, have hard problems.” The integration of information-centric and social-centric views of the world will be awfully valuable, if Google gets them right.
So congrats to Dodgeball and to Google!
1. Michael Nguyen on May 11, 2005 7:21 PM writes...
Trackbacks are broken on my blog, so I'm gonna repost what I talked about there.
"Dodgeball + Blogger Mobile + Mobile Web Search = Cool things.
Imagine this.
You send a text message to Dodgeball that you are at CoolPartyPlace. A post is generated on your Blogger blog, inviting others to come meet you. Google then sends individual directions (Google Maps) to everyone’s Gmail accounts including basic information on CoolPartyPlace (via Google Web Search). In addition to directions and venue information, Google supplies everyone with social information of all the people planning to come meet you (via Orkut/Dodgeball data). As you are waiting, you can flip through your cellphone and look at images of the people coming (orkut portrait) - of course, its based on proximity (Dodgeball’s 10 mile radius) so you can know who is coming first.
After meeting up, you come home and you see in your gmail inbox the links to everyone’s blogs that you met and you are automatically added to everyone’s orkut network."
Permalink to Comment2. Julian Bond on May 12, 2005 6:58 AM writes...
Dodgeball desperately needs better location information available on the phone and to phone apps. It also needs phones with a good development environment. And finally it needs flat rate cheap data transfer with phones.
So all the usual issues with walled gardens, awkward networks, lack of application development tools on the phone side, lack of standards and missing LBS support on the phone side.
So what's next? Google starts an MVNO?
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