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Google Acquires Dodgeball

Posted by Zonk on from the tagged dept.

kalki writes "Dodgeball.com, a service that uses mobile phones to help people meet up with friends who are in the same location, said on its website on Wednesday that it has been bought by Web search leader Google Inc. Also available on the official site is a Q&A about the deal." From the article: "As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken dodgeball about a far as we can alone. Since we finished grad school, we've been trying to figure out how to grow dodgeball and make it a better service along the way. We talked to a lot of different angel investors and venture capitalists, but no one really 'got' what we were doing - that is until we met Google."

4 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Info about the technology. by JaF893 · · Score: 4, Informative

    They don't use that technology at all. They know where you are because you have to text them to let them know where you are.

  2. Re:Info about the technology. by ChicagoBiker · · Score: 2, Informative
    No, they use the technology of the end user telling them where they are, there's no GPS or secret tech way of finding people. You text message Dodgeball.com that I'm at "Club Suds". It then sends out a text message to all of your friends on your list who have signed up that you're at "Club Suds". If they don't know where that is they'll have to ask you by replying to the text message and then you can text them back with directions.

    The service will however comb it's database and find complete strangers who have also text'd their friends saying "I'm at Club Suds" too, so then you can find other people who have reported being at the same bar you're at.

    But no, they (Dodgeball) have no way of actually determining where you are.

  3. Re:Like them or not, Goolge has some great offerin by Momoru · · Score: 2, Informative

    I really like Clusty.com because you can sort things by category, the way the old yahoo directory worked. So if you do a search for say "Paris" it will split the results into groups like "Paris Hilton", "Paris, France", "Paris Casino" etc... Unlike google where you have to either type in a specific phrase that would make the results clear, or wade through tons of useless results.

  4. Re:Orkut remains slow and bug ridden by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    check out myspace. its friendster++. It is reasonably fast, has many features and not many bugs. It rocks. It is what friendster could have been. Friendster had a great idea, achieved the critical mass and then just exploded in popularity, and then just dropped the ball as they could not scale for shit.