Charl Norman

DodgeBall, a hipster SMS-social networking service which was bought by the big G in 2005, has lost it’s founder. Google after buying the service didn’t do much besides implement a 5 digit short code and integrate google accounts. The service has always facinated me as it was a early adopter of mobile social technology and ahead of it’s time.

The founder of Dodgeball, Dennis Cowley, sold out to Google and joined the Googleplex to head up his (their) startup under the Google banner. He’s found the experience a frustrating one trying to convince the big wigs at the leading search engine that Dodgeball is worth engineer resources. (Why buy the service then?)

Dodgeball has not innovated in the last two years and has seen Twitter stomp on their market share. Dennis left this on his Flirkr page informing all of his departure:

It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space. And while it was a tough decision (and really disappointing) to walk away from dodgeball, I’m actually looking forward to getting to work on other projects again.

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