Make More Friends from Your Mobile Phone with Dodgeball

dodgeball is a mobile social networking community that joined the Google family way back in May 2005.
It is currently only available to 22 states in the US. Recently Google accounts have been intergrated into dodgeball.

The service is based on a very simple concept, you just need to send a text message to Google and it will help you to inform your friends and friends of your friends about your location where they can meet you for a drink if they’re somewhere around that area. This might also be a chance for you to get to know a hot girl next door.

I am quite certain that this is going to be another way for Google to widen grasp of its advertising program. Although there is no official information about dodgeball’s userbase, I believe it’s very limited to, well, those 22 states in the US. But we need to keep in mind the obvious fact that local advertising can be very targeted and, thus, very effective: at least, it sounds good to present a new sort of beer to a guy sitting in a bar and waiting for some of his friends to join him. But anyway they need to expand coverage of the service and allow users from more states in the US as well as from other countries to interact with their circles of friends: then it might be gaining more needed momentum. Sure, it might be difficult. But is there anything impossible for Google?

dodgeball has seen intense competition lately. The most obvious competitor is Yahoo! Mixd, which is slightly better than the service under review when it comes to helping users to allow or deny the privilege to invite others; here each invitee can kick his child invitees from the group.

This acquisition by Google was viewed by experts as a way for Google to implement mobile search to the mobile frontier and extend its reach and drive incremental ad revenue through Mobile Adwords. Amazing, isn’t it? But, when will dodgeball ever start to pump cash into Google’s pocket? I am not sure if Google even takes dodgeball seriously: after all, they have been virtually abandoned for more than a year already. Will dodgeball be another casualty in the web 2.0 competition? I wish I am wrong, but their vital signs seem bleak.