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Dodgeball Shuttered By Google, Its Co-Creator Promises To Clone It (GOOG)

CrowleyQuits.jpgNow that Google is shutting down mobile social network Dodgeball, one of the service's orginal creators -- who, after joining Google when it acquired Dodgeball in 2005, quit in May 2007 -- says he plans to create a new, similar service before SXSW in March.

That cofounder, Dennis Crowley, tells us it's going to be called Four Square.

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You can almost hear New York's tech scenesters cheering through their scarves, can't you?

Here's Crowley's post "So Google's finally gonna kill dodgeball, eh?":

Alex called me late last night with the news (which then spread like nerd-wildfire thru Lock's bday party).

Is anyone really surprised? Google clearly didn't care about dodgball while we were there and there hasn't been a full-time engineer working on dodgeball since we left (back in May 2007!). It's been great to have Harry keeping an eye on it since we left, so you can so you can thank him / buy him a whiskey for bringing it back to life all those times. :)

You know, Alex and I kind of selfishly built dodgeball for our friends in NYC (classic Shirky Situated Software). We tried build something that would make our Thursday nights more interesting and it just so happened that it worked pretty well and that a whole bunch of other people in other cities wanted to play too. So thanks for that... and I'll always be thankful all the good times and new friends that came out of the glory days of dodgeball (SXSW 06, anyone?)

So what's next? Well I don't know how many days we have left (30 days? 90 days?), but I've always said that it Google ever kills dodgeball, I'l build you guys a new one, so stayed tuned. (some of you know that me + Naveen have been cooking up some new stuff which is looking kind of hot). We'll hustle to get something for everyone to play with at SXSW. (And really Google? You couldn't wait till the end of ski season to kill it??)

And just on a sidenote, the whole mobile + social space is still pretty open. Even, what?, 5 years after Alex and I launched dball in April 2004, no one is really doing anything new. Sure, Brightkite showed us "Place Snap" and Loopt's rocking "Mixx" (ha!), but no one is really thinking about this space beyond just "Twitter with whereabouts"... so maybe Naveen and I can take a stab at fixing that. :)

ps: Hey Google, can I have the domain back please? Even just for my personal email? Pleeeaaasseeee?

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Google Kills A Bunch Of Products That Made It No Money

On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.

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