Buzz twittered a
story about dodgeball being down. (God that sentence shows what kind of geek I am). The story goes into the fallout between the dodgeball founders and Google. The founders left Google and many people think that Google will now let dodgeball die.
This whole story is interesting to me. I am a dodgeball user, but I do not find dodgeball to be all that useful. I think I can count on one hand how many times it has been useful twice in a month. I know part of this is because my friends do not really use it. If I knew more people using it, I might get more out of it. Of the 14 people on my friends list only about 6 of them use it regularly.
One of my pet peeves with dodgeball is that they never made San Jose or Silicon Valley its own city. Most of the time I get dodgeballs from people in the city going to bars. This is not very useful to me. I am not going to run up there just because I got a dodgeball.
Dodgeball had the feeling of a fad for me. In 2006 lots of people used it, but now it seems that people use it less often. Even if the people who do use it, use it sparingly. It is a service that one person cannot use alone.
Since I started using dodgeball I do not think they have added any features. I do not think it has become more useful. I do not know if that is a problem with the concept or if that is a problem with what Google was willing to do with it. I am not sure what social mobile computing looks like. What I know is that terrain has something to do with it. What you can do with social mobile computing is different in New York City and a rural area. It might be different in every city in America. I wonder if that scares a company like Google.
Twitter is an interesting idea to look at. I turn off the messages going to my cell phone, but it would kill my 500 messages a month. It is halfway mini blog/mobile social service/time waster. It is very much like the never ending cocktail party. It is not like you are really getting to know anyone, but you are listening to them try to be witty.
I am trying to think about what would make an interesting service, but nothing comes to mind. I guess if something did come to mind I would be working on it right now.
Labels: cell phone, Dodgeball, google, textmsg
