The End of Mobile Social Web 1.0

I first met Dennis Crowley in 2001, a few months before he and partner Alex Rainert, both grad students at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, launched the mobile version of Dodgeball as part of their thesis project. I remember thinking, this is interesting. Not long after that, Clay Shirky (inspired largely by Dodgeball and other ITP projects), wrote a great piece on what he called "situated software". In short, Dodgeball was an early indicator of a new ecosystem of lightweight apps create by small communities of users for each other.

And it's been fascinating to watch Dodgeball work its way through the multiple challenges of innovation in the mobile application space - from overcoming walled gardens, to massaging their UI model, to the dozens of social hacks to make the service appealing and fun without being annoying. (Crowley used to give presentations that had a whole slide called "The Ex-Girlfriend Problem"). In the process, they figured out how to make Dodgeball scale beyond its small early adopter community in downtown Manhattan.

When Google picked up Dodgeball 2 years ago, there were cheers throughout the scattered remnants of Silicon Alley. Gotham City still had something to teach the West Coast math geeks about taking the web to the streets. Developers in California spend their weekends hunched underneath their desks eating pizza and playing Doom. As Crowley's Dodgeball profile summed it up, New York's new breed of mobile developers were more likely to "spend my weekends either (a) fixing this website, (b) on a chairlift or (c) hungover." No Second Life here, we're looking for tools to have a more interesting, intense, serendipitous First Life.

So it's come as a real shame that Crowley and Rainert have left Google. It's truly the end of Mobile Social Web 1.0. While Dodgeball never figured out how to monetize its network without really pissing people off (there was an unsuccessful attempt to create an Absolut Vodka user that people could friend to get invited to events with free drinks), it was a light in the dark for entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to break open the mobile Internet, despite the obstacles imposed by mobile carriers. And it was just plain fun.

The worst part is that the future of the mobile social web looks bleak. Twitter has stolen a lot of the thunder as Dodgeball stagnated over the last year due to benign neglect inside the G-plex. But as a great comment on today's ValleyWag story speculating on a shutdown of Dodgeball puts it:

Twitter is just a suburban man's Dodgeball. They have no lives, therefore, they twitter.

If Twitter is the mobile social web 2.0, I want a downgrade.

More importantly though, I fear what this development has to say about Google's much-touted R&D model of letting employees spend a day working on their own projects. To date, the only thing that Google has figured out how to monetize out of beta is search.

If two talented and motivated innovators like Crowley and Rainert - who were given ALL of their time to work on an idea that was ALREADY PROVEN to be successful - were frustrated enough to leave the money and free gourmet food behind, it tells me that the Google research emperor might not have any clothes.