Dodgeball Can't Dodge Google Cash
from the buying-up-everything dept
Google has a thing for buying up fun projects that get lots of attention, but which don't necessarily have a business model. They bought Blogger a few years ago, and were apparently part of the feeding frenzy over things like Flickr and Bloglines -- though, they lost out on both. However, it looks like they're back to acquiring quirky startups with the decision to buy up the two person mobile social networking system, Dodgeball. The service, which lets people let their friends know (by text message) what bar they're at, was one of the first mobile social software offerings to get popular. Still, for the most part, it sounds like there's no grand strategy behind the acquisition, other than that the Google folks think it's a cool project, and they'd like to have the people who worked on it work at Google.
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