"Damn, here we go again
People talking shit, but when shit hit the fan
Everything I'm not, made me everything I am"
—Kanye West, "Everything I Am"

In 2000 Dennis Crowley founded a company called Dodgeball, which built an application that ran on your not-so-smart phone. The point of Dodgeball was to link up with your friends and discover new things to do. It was great fun for extremely social, high tech geeks. The founders eventually sold the Dodgeball to Google in 2005.

In retrospect, Dennis...