There are some core differences between twitter and dodgeball and they revolve around one's social network. When someone says social network, we think of myspace, facebook, and other sites that bring people together and help reconnect or establish new connections. Twitter can be worked into one of these social networks. It's a network that you can build up and then bring twitter in on later. Dodgeball, however, is based on a different kind of social network. It's based on the original social network. You know, the people you actually want to see in real life. The ones you hang out with on the weekends. Dodgeball is great for prebuilt close-knit networks. For example, if you could get a church group to sign up, they typically already have a network established. I wouldn't be surprised if dodgeball was popular in the gay community because that would be like signing up a giant, very socially active family. It's a prebuilt network that interacts in real life and can just be transferred to dodgeball. You see, the innate problem is that twitter can allow you to build your social network online first and them implement twitter into that existing network later. dodgeball doesn't let you do that. You can't build a network of just the friends that you hang out with in real life and exclude the others from your other online networks and then implement dodgeball after your network is built. You have to start with dodgeball. That means the first person in your network is going to sign up with absolutely zero friends. And then that friend is going to convince his/her other friends to join and then the social network gets transferred to dodgeball. It basically relies on word of mouth and the spreading can't go faster than the word can travel between people. Dodgeball requires network transfer, not network building.

If you're going to start with a highly active group and have it spread through word of mouth, then it's going to have to spread through an existing network. I just did a basic search on dodgeball for people with "d" in their first name that lived in Los Angeles. As you can see, it's most guys. If you're thinking that "d" is a guy's letter, then try any other letter. It's almost all guys. I would bet it's predominately homosexual. Simply because of the need for the network to already be established. The reason all of this matters is that the founders of dodgeball recently announced that they're leaving Google because their project wasn't getting the attention and funding that they'd hoped for. I'm sure Google purchased dodgeball and then realized that it wasn't growing like all of the other networks. It might still have been a good purchase simply because it connects the real life to new communication, which is what Google is trying to do with Local Search, GOOG-411, and SMS. I just don't see dodgeball going mainstream until it breaches other social networks or Google comes up with a way for the network to be built first without the need to add dodgeball until later.

Labels: dodgeball, google, social network, twitter