The Google empire is once again expanding by taking over Dodgeball.com, a company which provides social networking services. Dodgeball.com is based in New York and is the result of a University project developed by Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert.

The services offered Dodgeball.com allow you to announce your friends of your location, announce a user if one of his friends in close by and it offers the possibility of transmitting a message to any user entering a predefined area. By taking over this company, Google reconfirms its interest for the „digital socializing" phenomenon. Another company Google manifested a lot of interest for is Orkut, a project designed by one of Google's employees that provided the same social networking services.

Dodgeball.com founders have managed to take the project to an advanced stage, enough to draw the attention of investors, but the only one they agreed with was Google, whose concept about user interaction through mobile devices is close to the beliefs of the developers.

For the period to come, Dodgeball users won't experience major changes except the obligation to accept Google's regulations and restrictions. Still, the two founders will soon start developing new functions for these services, having the necessary resources to materialize their ideas and projects.