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There is http://grandcentral.com/ but also http://dodgeball.com/ is another. These might be forgotten now but both might come back into play real soon once Android is available.

Anyone remember Dodgeball.com? Google bought 'em when they were hot, everyone expected great things, check out their founder's resignation letter.

Google is competitive, outside and inside. If a product doesn't have a strong voice, strong support, it'll get starved. There are lots of examples of this, where Google (or Yahoo or any other company) buys a smaller company and it's products just kinda evaporate.

Sometimes it is truly a mismatch in cultures. Other times the folks coming in get sucked into 'more interesting' projects and their original ones languish. Once in a while the goal of buying the company was to shut it down, or at least to deny it's benefits to a competitor.

Whatever the case whenever a buyout happens smart folks immediately put together transition plans, if only contingency ones.

In my career I've had CA buy and rape/pillage/burn (not always in that order!) any number of products we've depended upon. Yahoo! also has a record of ingesting, partially digesting, then eventually burping up a barely recognizable (and rarely for the better) version of the original service. Same for Amazon - anyone else recall Firefly, PlanetAll, A9 with street-views, etc.?

Urchin is just one more example of why committing to a product or service that isn't it's owner's primary interest is a risky gamble. Never assume the status quo; companies & priorities change and that's how inattentive customers get caught out.

They are already doing it with Dodgeball which they never did much with and could have provided them with free access to this data.

What makes you think that just because Google picked the company up that they will give it the support it needs to flourish?

Plenty of Google's recent purchases have been left to die (most notably Dodgeball) .

Just because we currently have a mostly positive view of Google and what they have done, doesn't mean that it's a rose garden for everything they buy.

From what I understand from rumors heard before the departure of Dennis and Alex, formally of Google's Dodgeball, they are tied up in endless meetings and conference calls rather than having the opportunity to work on their project.

Or get a little more creative. Google knows you contact someone through g-mail and orkut a lot. The gPhone knows that they visit a particular resturant on a regular basis. The next time you walk by this resturant, that resturant sends you a targeted message letting you know that your friend is there.

It's why they bought out Dodgeball. Mobile Social Networking has been getting a lot of mention lately (especially with SXSW going on last week) and while Dodgeball isn't at all innovative anymore (other MSNs have more features now) it will become important when Google has a HUGE database of venues in 20+ cities and the visit frequency of its users along with reviews, tags, etc.

Um.... A little publicity, a little goodwill, ads next to the YouTube content, good programmers, and a method of distribution they consider the future. Not so good on a cash-on-a-barrel level, but quite good for a company with some vision....

Yes, because Google buying other startups (like Dodgeball has worked wonders. Please note that Dodgeball hasn't had any increase in development since being purchased and other similar services have taken off with new ideas and better features because Google refuses to allow more development.

Boo.

Google is doing similar things. Pretty soon, however, people are just going to have one account on one giant social networking site.

Yup, Dodgeball (owned by Google) uses your Google Account login to authenticate you. Blogger uses the same authentication whether you are doing a comment or hosting your own blog.

Personally, I would rather see separate accounts for everything but it's not like they can't track just about everything we do already.

On the other hand, I know a myspace who was 18 when I first met her, and I thought she looked 26 then.

You mean a "person" right? Myspace isn't 18 years old. Just wanted to clear that confusion up.

As far as differences in "social networking sites" (I hate that term as they rarely do anything of the sort) go, yes, they are all entirely different. I utilize Dodgeball although not for social networking (I'm fairly certain that no one uses it for that as the notification of friends of friends hasn't worked in at least 6 months). I use it to keep track of which venues I've been to and when. I used to post the RSS feed on my website as the content there generally pertains to restaurants and where I've been going to so it was a nice fit (once the RSS feed died when they switched to Google's backend I never bothered to reuse it once fixed).

Myspace and Facebook are pretty much worthless in the sense of "social networking" unless you are talking about being online "friends". Plenty of people want another number but rarely do you meet anyone new that is interested in actually being your friend IRL (unless we are talking about 40 year old men and 15 year old girls).

While the lines of real life and Internet life are blurring these sites are not doing much to fix that. It might not be the sites fault, obviously, as their users are the ones that decide how to use it "properly".

Dodgeball?

The argument the employer will have is that they are legitimately tracking their property (i.e. the mobile phone). I don't see it as being a huge issue, as a lot of organisations would be able to build location awareness into their business process. For example, a services organisation being able to send a message to all technicians in the area of a customer fault. Something that would traditionally have meant ringing all technicians who *might* be in the area from guesswork. With consumer services like buddyPing and Dodgeball gaining acceptance, it doesn't seem like the consumer is too bothered about publishing their location to their friends as long as privacy issues are taken care of, and it does add an interesting extension to your mobile for Location Based Services. Mobile services are becoming better because of LBS, and from a consumer point of view, the mantra, "If you don't like it, don't use it" comes to mind. Companies doing it is a little bit different, and they still have to follow stringent data protection rules when using the data.

I think the main parallel to find in comparing the recent tech acquisition spree to that of 1999/2000 is that companies are applying the "buy now figure it out later" synergy strategy again. I think a lot of these companies are seeing a vague future for themselves as desktop application providers in Web X.0 -- but they are scrambling in a land grab on search, voip, mobile...I mean, when Google buys something as fad-ish as dodgeball.com and ebay gets into voip, to me it signals speculation and hedging on these companies' parts. They have no clue what will work and what will not -- and eBay shareholders should be upset that eBay is gambling billions on speculative technologies.

Dodge, Dive, Dip, Duck, and Dodge.

Good points.

I have a hard time believing most myspace users are there to meet real-life people when I see the line "So-and-soo has as 44392 friends." I can't comment on xanga or the others, as I haven't used them.

One piece of software that is an interesting use of technology for real-world social purposes is http://www.dodgeball.com/ (recently acquired by Google). Their slogan is "see your friends more" and since it's all cellphone-based, its pretty much determined that their service only really works in the real world.

Cheers,

Lux

Based on ideas taken from Wikipedia and dodgeball , Cellphedia allows its members to broadcast questions to its community and receive answers, using SMS text messaging on cell phones. Here is how it works, according to " Cellphedia Melds Facts with Mobile Smart Mobs " from E-Commerce Times. First, you register for free on the site and you indicate what are your subjects of interest. If you want to ask a question, it is sent to all the members who expressed interest in this particular subject. Finally, the first answer received by Cellphedia is sent back to you. This means that later answers, which could have been more accurate, are discarded. But this service is still very young and its creator is working hard to improve it. Read more...

Here is a general description of this service, created by Limor Garcia as part of her thesis while at New York University.

Inspired by Wikipedia, the all-volunteer, online community encyclopedia, and Dodgeball, a cell phone-based social networking service, Cellphedia allows its members to broadcast questions to its community and receive answers, all through a mobile phone.

Registration for the service is free at the Cellphedia Web site. After registering, members choose areas that they're interested in -- art, architecture, food, music, etc. A member can ask a question in any area, but the questions go to people who have chosen the area as one that interests them.

Questions and answers are sent and received using SMS on your cell phone. And as I wrote above, only the first answer received by CellPhedia is sent back to the person who asked a question.

Unlike Wikipedia, answers to questions via Cellphedia aren't subjected to community review to assess their accuracy. And while multiple members might answer a question, only the first answer received by the system is forwarded to an inquirer.

Garcia noted that group editing of answers is her next priority for the service. "I'm going to open it up for people to correct answers as well," she said.

Interviewed for this article, Howard Rheingold, from Smart Mobs , said that Cellphedia was another example of the convergence between technologies such as cell phone, computers and Internet.

"The phone gives you instant communication wherever you are," he explained. "And the Internet enables you to connect with people who share an interest. Combining that gives you the ability to create something like Wikipedia with a social network."

"It remains a question about whether she's going to get a sufficient critical mass," he noted. "Wikipedia works because there's a sufficient number of people working on it."

Now, let's look at some examples of questions and answers stored on the Cellphedia central server. As you can see, there are all kinds of requests.

• Short question, short answer
  Q: age new pope
  A: 78
• Short question, long answer
  Q: what's a phreak
  A: a phreak is someone who is highly skilled in the use of phone systems. phreaksare considered a subset of hackers.
• Long question, short answer
  Q: does someone know how to install osx tiger on to an ipod for later installation on an ibook?
  A: not possible
• A question without answer
  Q: where can i find info on time travel?

For another point of view about this service, you can read this article from Wired News, "

Okay, so if you live in the New York, you might actually try the following:

Use google to find a movie that might be worth the money you will be spending.
Use google to find a movie theatre that has the movie on schedule.
Use google's orkut or google's newly aquired dodgeball to find someone to join your movie evening.
Use google ride to order a cab to the movie theatre.
Use google groups to discuss the result of the evening.

So, if google was smart, they would enhance their APIs to encourage people to combine different google applications. My first attempt would be something like a google timewaster/blinddate/"hey, I'm new in this town, are there real people around?"/... Or is this something labs.google.com will provide in the next six months? and so on... I'm tired of this "what if google did a, b, c" I would like to do it myself.

Dude--whatever. Look at how cool their founders are. They're not even looking at the camera. That's because these pictures aren't portraits--they were take by papparazzi. And look at the hair. Geeks don't even have access to that much gel. And the people that use their site have cool names, like "Grellan" and "Alex" (as a girl.) Everyone knows all geeks are named either Craig or Rob. Plus, they all dress in Flash, so they look like they walked out of an iPod commercial. Yeah right, losers using the service. Huh you're funny--way to funny to be a geek.

The timing of this is quite interesting. In one paragraph Paul Graham says:

"What companies should do is go out and discover startups when they're young, before VCs have puffed them up into something that costs hundreds of millions to acquire."

And what did Google do today? It bought a 2 people company.

for now at least. See their FAQ: http://www.dodgeball.com/social/help_basics.php