At what appears to be a Man/Boy social club, a game of dodge ball gets taken a bit too seriously by a man with a big green ball.

Unless you happen to not be part of the game and you're holding up a video camera.

The Olympics aren't the only thing going on in Canada right now- some students in Alberta cliched the unofficial world record for World's Largest Dodgeball Game with some 1200 players. That's a lot of balls.

After Google bought Dodgeball from him and shut it down, New York entrepreneur Dennis Crowley knocked off his own idea to create Foursquare, a new friend-finding app. The coverage likewise feels familiar.

Too busy partying in Austin, Dennis Crowley never replied to our questions about whether Foursquare was built on code owned by Google. He's denied it to other press, but we hear he's telling buddies otherwise.

In the '90s, the Web cognoscenti joked about doing crack. But New York Times columnist David Carr actually did crack! Which might explain his befuddlement in this clip from the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin.

Even though Google killed Dodgeball, Dennis Crowley reassured the socially inept that they'd still be able to find their friends at bars with his newly launched Foursquare. One problem: it may not be his.

Google has axed six services, from Google Video uploads to a shopping-catalog search. But none has sparked more outrage than the closure of Dodgeball.com. Dennis Crowley, the friend-locating service's twentysomething founder, is miffed.

A medical professional must have been on hand at the Chateau Marmont to keep popular silver screen star Kirsten Dunst from busting a gut. The Spider Man star was laughing uncontrollably at the antics of Mac pitchman and ex-flame of Drew Barrymore, Justin Long. Dunst was thoroughly impressed by Long's comedic culinary consumption antics, even going as far as to say that Long is way funnier than "that Charlie Chaplin dude." Long reveled in the attention, even going as far as to moonwalk a piece of chicken into his mouth.

Click to viewDigg users should be glad merger talks with Google have cooled, writes Slate's Farhad Manjoo. Had Digg fallen into Marissa Mayer's frosting-laced clutches, the site would have probably become another startup lost in what Manjoo calls "the Google Black Hole." It happened to FeedBurner this week. And the RSS ad network, was just the latest, following Jaiku, JotSpot, Dodgeball, GrandCentral, and Measure Map. Their tales of doom in the Googleplex, below.

Dodgeball founder and departed Googler Dennis Crowley celebrates his 32nd birthday by embracing his sister. Can you suggest a better headline? Do so in the comments. The best one will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner: "Yet another Valley Mashup" by jim_rock. (Photo from Dennis Crowley)

The new iPhone will let you broadcast your location to people through a program called Loopt. And because this phone is now just 200 bucks, it'll finally become an industry standard instead of a fringe geek toy. So get ready for the biggest annoying shift in your social life since Facebook, because Loopt is about to do for the world what a little site called Dodgeball did for the Gawker crowd in 2004.

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizing is already set to be 2008's Gladwellian The Long Tailing Point Web 2.0 trend book of the year (especially after every blogger in Manhattan went to its release party). Former Gawker Mascot Andrew Krucoff is totally in the book! Because he was an early adopter of phone-based OG social networking gizmo Dodgeball, you see. Everyone else in the New York media scene signed up for it too, but only to write about it. The Krucoff excerpt, via noted music blog Young Manhattanite, is below, accompanied by a comment from mysterious YM contributer 99 that saves us the trouble of making fun of it.

Venture capital has found its way onto Google's open mobile platform, Android. W2Pi Studios, the company behind WiFiArmy, a videogram written for Android, is set to take $5 million in funding, a company source tells Valleywag. Company president Peter Whatanitch explains the game's premise in the video above. "This game allows you to play a first-person shooter anytime, anywhere." Charming! Anyway, it sounds a lot like Dodgeball to us. And we know how that worked out in Google's hands.

A message just came in via Dodgeball, the largely defunct text messaging network that was once New York's great internet hope, about a wake for Flip, the scrapbook site for teenaged girls just shuttered by Conde Nast. "It's like two social networking black holes crashing into each other," writes our tipster.

In private moments, Dodgeball cofounder Dennis Crowley will tell any startup entrepreneur in New York asking: Avoid getting acquired by Google. "Sure, he's not upset about the $40 million and he's glad to be dating models," a source close to Crowley told me. "But he's not happy with Google." Not all Google-acquired founders are so bitter. Word is the FeedBurner guys love it at Google. But FeedBurner's best innovations are in advertising, not engineering. Some say the same goes for Google these days. (Photo by rosswerks)

An addendum to last week's story about the robbery at Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley's new workplace. Turns out there were actually two transvestite prostitutes who broke into the office, and he has the security camera footage to prove it. [Teen Drama]

Someone broke into the offices of Area/Code, the startup where Dodgeball.com founder Dennis Crowley currently works (after bitterly leaving Google just three months ago). Taken were Crowley's laptop, a flatscreen monitor, and a digital camera. Left behind was the transvestite hooker still asleep on the office couch. [Teen Drama]

MyBlogLog, the well-received web "widget" that displays images of recent visitors to your site, has re-emerged after being purchased by Yahoo back in January. David Dalka reports that Robyn Tippins, the community manager for MyBlogLog, promises a redesign and several new features.

NICK DOUGLAS — [UPDATE: It's alive! Dodgeball is the Terry Schiavo of Web 2.0!] Sometimes a product just dies, horribly and suddenly, as if it were unlucky enough to be under a falling piano, stepping into an empty elevator shaft, getting smacked upside the head with a very large rock. It seems that's the fate of Dodgeball, the text-based find-your-friends-at-the-bar service that Google bought in 2005 and promptly abandoned. As of today, the front page is just a "502 server error" (a friend tells me that means the backend server, which actually handles page requests, is dead).