Earlier this week, Facebook was granted a broad
patent on mobile location-based social networks. It seems to
cover everything from members of a social network sharing their location with each other through their mobile phones to manual checkins. In other words, it sounds like Facebook just patented Foursquare's main product. The application was submitted in February, 2007, well before
Foursquare was even founded. But it forgot to mention one thing. In the long list of more than 50 other previous patents it cites as prior art, it never mentions perhaps the most obvious patent of all: The
Dodgeball patent. The Dodgeball patent lists as its inventors
Dennis Crowley and
Alex Rainert , the co-founders of
Dodgeball, an early mobile social network acquired by Google in 2005 and shut down in 2007. Crowley, of course, went on to found Foursquare, where he is currently the CEO (Rainert also now
works at Foursquare as chief product officer).
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