Dodgeball

Crowley, by Boris Veldhuijzen
van Zanten via flickr.

Dennis Crowley is betting that you want your phone to tell you what to do in New York.
 
This is actually a bet that the 33-year-old programmer has been making since 2001, when he became Internet-famous for building a Web site called Dodgeball. The service, which let its members text their whereabouts to friends at any given time, was a basically a social-media network before there were many. It was initially conceived as a “way to coordinate drinking plans,” and was quickly adopted in certain New York media and tech circles. Remarkably, it survived the bursting of the tech bubble and was acquired by Google in 2005.

But, unable to figure out a use for it, Google shut it down earlier this year.
 
Crowley still believes that people want to augment their social lives with technology.  “After I left Dodgeball in 2007,” Crowley said over a beer at a loud, dark-paneled bar called the Scratcher, near his Cooper Square office, “I worked for a company called Area Code, designing interactive games using real-world spaces. Like a game of Monopoly played by thousands of people all using their GPS locations to make moves.”

A year later, Crowley and partner Naveen Selvadurai started Foursquare, an app launched a little more than three months ago to considerable fanfare from outlets like The New York Times and Wired (along with an early mention by the New York Observer).  Part of the reason it drew so much attention is because if it works, Foursquare could revolutionize the way New Yorkers get information about restaurants, bars, weekend plans, stores, lunch specials, landmarks, scenic views, and the like. Or, depending on what happens in the coming months, it might just turn out to be a very cleverly designed game.