jan 15
2009
Dodgeball, We Hardly Knew Ya
Dodgeball is shutting down (which is news for about a dozen New Yorkers), but Dens is working on a replacement.
11 comments
"You know, Alex and I kind of selfishly built dodgeball for our friends in NYC."
What a load. Dennis Crowley is the worst kind of dot-com tool. The pseudo hipster who hides behind his own wealth while pretending to be a grass roots "movement" who does things "just for fun".
The reality is he's loaded, went to NYU to study ways to bring business into ideas onto the web, and this astro-turfing persona is a perfect example.
If he wanted to just do things for fun, he'd do that. H didn't sell out to Google because he wanted better engineers. He wanted to cash out like every NYU biz student.
Hopefully this recession will cull him and his ilk so the web can finally get back to normal.
posted by FlyOnTheWall at 2:11 PM on January 15, 2009 
And "normal" means....what, exactly? Free? Less "dot-com tools?" I'm afraid THEM boxes ain't closing.
posted by CRZ at 2:19 PM on January 15, 2009
Lets trust fund tools forcing bad ideas into a market and raking in cash from them. This recession won't support BS like that anymore.
Use Facebook, Dens. We all are.
posted by FlyOnTheWall at 3:03 PM on January 15, 2009
what's an astro-turfer?
posted by dens at 3:09 PM on January 15, 2009
While I'm grateful to Harry for keeping dodgeball alive and will miss it when it's summarily executed, I can't wait to see what's next. I haven't found anything that approaches Dodgeball in terms of simplicity and usability.
posted by josh at 3:49 PM on January 15, 2009
An astro-turfer is someone with an agenda who pretends to be a voice for a grassroots movement behind some "great idea". aka: a neo-web2.0-shill.
posted by FlyOnTheWall at 3:50 PM on January 15, 2009
Whoa, apparently the Gawker voice is spilling over into my comments today!
posted by Rex at 6:24 PM on January 15, 2009
I was talking to a friend in China. We think they're ready for foursquare.cn
posted by taulpaul at 7:31 PM on January 15, 2009
@flyonthewall - umm... what? a) who cares if he was rich already, b) what the fuck do you care if he wanted to make some money, c) what's being a hipster got to do with whether the dude can code or not? and d) "grass roots" movement has dennis ever pretended to?
posted by Rick at 11:48 PM on January 15, 2009
a) Some of us care if a Richie Rich whines about things "not being fair"
b) I care because I know lots of people who have dealt with Dens who are happily playing tiny violins right now.
c) The dot-com boom was littered with rich kids pretending to be "street" who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. For example, if they could code and this was a "labor of love" it would have never been sold to Google.
d) Dennis has pretended there's a groundswell of people who just love Dodgeball and has a strong reputation for astro-turfing any blog post anywhere that dares to defy that delusion.
Nah, nah, nah, nah. Nah, nah, nah, nah. Wa-aaa-aave, good bye!
Nah, nah, nah, nah. Nah, nah, nah, nah. Wa-aaa-aave, good bye!
Nah, nah, nah, nah. Nah, nah, nah, nah. Wa-aaa-aave, good bye!
posted by FlyOnTheWall at 12:36 AM on January 16, 2009
if I wrote a book that I believed in, and it rocked because I can write, and I sold it to a major publisher who then made a few hundred copies and dedicated no PR to it...hmm, am I wrong to be frustrated? When you create something, long before you know it would ever be sold and make money, you are invested in it. There is nothing wrong with being frustrated that someone promised to take your work to the next level using resources you could only have access to through them, and then just let it die. There's such a stench of jealousy around here, it's ironic that Dennis is the one who openly jokes about acting like a teenager. It's called not taking yourself too seriously, but taking your work seriously.
posted by kt at 2:12 PM on January 18, 2009
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