harryh ([info]harryh) wrote,
2009-01-15 13:15:00
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notes on dodgeball.com

Ya, so I found out from the same blog post as the rest of you. I would have thought that someone would have told me internally first, but I guess not. In fact, I was denying the whole thing at Lock's birthday party last night because it didn't make any sense. I guess I was wrong. It's been fun keeping the lights on these past couple years for you guys, and I'm disappointed that my corporate masters have decided it's no longer worth the bother. Oh well.

Anyways, I don't know yet what "We will communicate the exact time-frame shortly" means yet, but when we figure that out I'll put a note of some kind up on the dodgeball homepage. In addition, for those of you that care about this sort of thing, I'm going to do some work to make it easy to export your checkin history in a convenient format (above and beyond the iCal that is already available). If you have any particular formats you might want it in, feel free to leave a comment here and I'll see what I can do. Chances are it'll be a gdata feed of some kind.

Don't fret too much about not having a tool like this to use when dodgeball gets turned off. Like you, I'm pretty unimpressed with most of the other current offerings, but I know of a couple soon-to-be-released things in the works. Keep an eye out, and we'll all find a new home that suits our needs just fine.
Tags: dodgeball, google, shutdown, work

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  • 21 comments

[info]kellianne

January 15 2009, 19:06:22 UTC 3 years ago

It's been no fun for me to dodgeball ever since the love power was booted off the project! Cheers to something new.

[info]terrajen

January 15 2009, 19:10:22 UTC 3 years ago

thanks for keeping it running for us!

[info]leahculver

January 15 2009, 19:29:10 UTC 3 years ago

Will there be any export of the place database? Hmm... that seems like the most useful part of Dodgeball that would be difficult to re-create from scratch.

[info]harryh

January 15 2009, 19:40:10 UTC 3 years ago

Not sure yet. Maybe. It's on my "hopefully" list.

[info]ldandersen

January 15 2009, 20:12:00 UTC 3 years ago

An export of the places database would be awesome.

[info]janellegunther

January 15 2009, 19:42:50 UTC 3 years ago

i'd like to have my reviews as well as check-in history, of course. maybe the top-10 checked in places (or a list of all!). some people may be interested in their crushes - you can reveal that information now, right?

[info]harryh

January 15 2009, 19:44:45 UTC 3 years ago

Ah, reviews! Hadn't been thinking about those! Thx for the reminder.

Most checked in venue in nyc btw: Barcade (barely beating out The Magician).

[info]asabass

January 22 2009, 04:57:15 UTC 3 years ago

Just curious: Do you know what the most checked in venue in Seattle is?

Reading this article made me a little angry, with the implication that it was just an NY thing at this point. My friends and I out here still use it ALL THE TIME.

[info]harryh

January 22 2009, 05:22:29 UTC 3 years ago

#1 in Seattle is Linda's followed very closely by Viceroy and then McLeod.

The article shouldn't get you angry. I know it's NY biased, but the gist of it is the same for any city. Dodgeball has always only been used by a fairly small # of people, so it's clearly not a workable as a business (at least in the way that Google has run it), but it's still an awesome little website/service and it's kinda sad that it's time for it to go.

Don't fret too much though. I know of a couple of new things being worked on that will be suitable replacements. Keep and eye out here, I'll definitely link to them when they are ready to go (hopefully close to the time that things are shuttered at dodgeball).

[info]asabass

January 22 2009, 07:08:14 UTC 3 years ago

Those top 3 are comfortingly predictable. I think it was the other big dodgeball-using circle of friends (it really seemed like there was only two) checking in at Viceroy, none of my friends frequented the place.

I checked in many a time at Linda's and McLeod, to be sure.

The vast majority of my check-ins were from Mcleod, the Twilight Exit (closest bar to my house), and the Roanoke Inn (bar on Mercer Island I worked at for 2 years). One of my favorite use for it was to make everyone I was already hanging out with look at their phones.

Anyway. I'm glad New Things are on the horizon, and thank you for keeping it going as long as you have.

[info]anarkystic

January 15 2009, 19:56:32 UTC 3 years ago

aye, i was out at a birthday party denying things as well until somebody brought up the article on the iphone, tsk tsk internal communications

[info]spangleyrocks

January 15 2009, 20:39:57 UTC 3 years ago

sad news, for sure. thanks for keeping it chuggin' along for the past few years, harry!

[info]sadotter

January 15 2009, 21:59:51 UTC 3 years ago

Oh well, so much for my bug fix requests!

[info]joshc

January 16 2009, 00:13:03 UTC 3 years ago

thanks for keeping it afloat! I would love to have my complete history even as something simple like a big text file.

[info]slimey_limey

January 16 2009, 01:50:39 UTC 3 years ago

Out of curiosity, what are the expenses for a typical month of the shortcode + SMS service?

[info]harryh

January 16 2009, 01:57:44 UTC 3 years ago

I can't really give out that information, but if you do a little back of the envelope math you can probably get pretty close. It's not crazy expensive, but it's not trivial either.

SMS fees are outrageous. The phone companies suck.

[info]slimey_limey

January 16 2009, 02:09:45 UTC 3 years ago

Yeah, we were doing some such calculations the other night at SeattleWireless.

A friend and I are working on doing a dball clone that's tuned for Seattle, since there are something like 20 people here who are rather fond of it. (There's not much to tune, but we're improving handling of chain restaurants, for example.)

[info]billetdoux

January 16 2009, 03:40:14 UTC 3 years ago

Wrote a little eulogy for you guys over at the tbg site: http://www.barbariangroup.com/posts/1562-soliloquy_for_dodgeball

[info]harryh

January 16 2009, 03:43:48 UTC 3 years ago

Thx! Just saw your twitter link moments ago! I really want to link to these from the dodgeball.com homepage when I put up a notice tomorrow or Monday.

Yours might be a tougher sell to the corporate masters though as it's a bit more critical of Google.

[info]gleemie

January 16 2009, 08:22:28 UTC 3 years ago

dick move on google's part to let you find out from a blog post. :(

[info]iamdonte

January 16 2009, 11:26:29 UTC 3 years ago

lame you had to find out that way, but at least you kept the fire going as long as you could.
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