Dodgeball: A Most Perplexing Google Tale

Unusual numbers of the smartest people in the world line up to try to get INTO Google -- so it must take a lot for a couple of founders of a start-up acquired by Google to very publicly and bitterly quit the company.

That's what Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert did. Back in 2005, they were the only two employees of Dodgeball -- a kind of cell phone-based real-life social networking service (got that?), which was already becoming wildly popular among New York's technosnobbies. The thing had potential -- and, in fact, Helio's Buddy Beacon is perhaps what Dodgeball could have become. But instead, Dodgeball stalled.

Something went awry for Dodgeball inside the Googleplex, but neither Crowley nor Rainert are talking about it -- except in their post this week on Flickr. They put up a photo of themselves giving Google a thumbs-down, and wrote that Google never put any resources behind Dodgeball.

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