Dodgeball

» see dodgeball.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

dodgeball never reached turkey. it was a twenty-us-cities sms product on us mobile carriers, and the entire product idea required network density that did not exist outside a small set of college-aged-urbanite contexts in the american northeast and west coast. you texted your location to dodgeball, dodgeball texted your friends within ten blocks, and the friends came to find you. the catch was that you needed friends already inside the service for the sms-out to mean anything. that was a hard chicken-and-egg problem outside of nyu, and dodgeball never solved it at scale.

dennis crowley and alex rainert built dodgeball at the nyu interactive telecommunications program in 2000. it was a graduate thesis project that turned into a real running service in new york. by 2004 it had spread to roughly twenty cities, mostly through tech press and word of mouth among design school crowds. google bought the company in may 2005 for an undisclosed amount, the kind of acquisition that gets one paragraph in a press release and never gets revisited.

inside google, dodgeball did not get a single meaningful update for two years. crowley said in interviews afterward that he could not get internal resources approved, and that the founders watched their own service stagnate while fielding the same email about it from outside reporters. crowley and rainert left google in april 2007. crowley publicly described the experience as incredibly frustrating.

google announced the shutdown in january 2009 with a vic gundotra blog post saying the service would be discontinued in the next couple of months. the lights went out in february 2009. google launched its replacement, google latitude, the same week. latitude itself died in 2013. crowley had already relaunched the same idea under a new name in march 2009, four weeks after dodgeball's shutdown, with a fresh ios client and the name foursquare. that timing was not a coincidence.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

the original mechanic was the cleanest version of mobile social anyone had built. you sent a text message to a shortcode with your current location, dodgeball figured out which of your friends were within ten blocks, and it texted them with your venue name. it ran without smartphones. the iphone did not exist yet. dodgeball worked on whatever sms-capable phone you had, which in 2000-2005 was every phone, and the sms cost was the only friction.

the social mechanic, the check-in as a public broadcast to a small friend list, was the part that propagated. crowley and rainert had figured out something subtle: people enjoyed announcing where they were, not for utility but because it was a small social signal that you were out doing something. that became the entire premise of foursquare four years later, and downstream of that, of every story-and-status feature on every app since.

~ the day it died ~

the announcement came from vic gundotra, then google's vice president of engineering, in a blog post on january 14, 2009. the post said google was discontinuing dodgeball.com in the next couple of months and was rolling out google latitude as the location-sharing layer instead. latitude was a different product, embedded inside google maps, designed for continuous background location rather than venue check-ins. it solved a different problem.

the dodgeball user base, which was small but loyal, did not migrate to latitude. they migrated to twitter, which had been growing during dodgeball's two-year freeze and had absorbed the spontaneous-status-update market without trying. the small group of dedicated dodgeball regulars in new york moved on, mostly to crowley's next thing.

~ what it became ~

crowley launched foursquare on march 11, 2009 at sxsw with naveen selvadurai as co-founder. the design ideas were the same as dodgeball's, ported to the smartphone era and dressed up with a points-and-badges layer that made the check-in feel like a small rewarded action. by 2010 foursquare had passed dodgeball's all-time user count by an order of magnitude. by 2013 it had passed it by two orders of magnitude. the difference between the two was platform timing, not product idea.

google latitude died in august 2013, four years after the dodgeball replacement launch. the lineage of failed google social products began with dodgeball and latitude, with buzz and plus coming after. crowley sold foursquare in different forms over the next decade and ended up running a much more b2b version of the same data layer. dodgeball's only direct legacy is foursquare itself, and the small confirmation that crowley had been right at twenty-three about what people wanted from a phone in their pocket.

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