It seems that Dodge­ball is slowly crum­bling apart.  I can still use it from my phone, but can no longer log in due to a tech­ni­cal glitch.  Nobody actu­ally fol­lows their sup­port email address and the guys that started the com­pany, who left in April, are still listed on the main Dodge­ball bio page.  Aside from support@, those are the only two other email addresses listed any­where on their site.  I have repeat­edly emailed all of them but still can’t solve the prob­lem.  I have also found that I am not alone in the mat­ter.  Sev­eral friends are expe­ri­enc­ing the same issue.

The prac­ti­cal upshot of all of this is that while I can use Dodge­ball to check in to places, I can’t add or con­firm friends using the web inter­face.  I have sev­eral pend­ing approval that I just can­not do any­thing with.  I under­stand that there is some kind of arcane com­mand syn­tax I can SMS to Dodge­ball to add friends, but that’s only if I know their phone num­bers, and some I only know their email addresses and nick­names.  (Yes, I could email them to get their num­ber and then use the arcane SMS com­mands, but that’s more work than I’m will­ing to do when I should be able to just log in via the web.)

If any­one knows the solu­tion to my prob­lem, I would be much obliged.  The error mes­sage I keep get­ting is:

Oops, the dodge­ball account you spec­i­fied is already hooked up with a Google account (though we can’t tell you which one!).

Please press the “Back” but­ton and try again.

I think that when Dodge­ball accounts and Google accounts merged ear­lier this year, there was some issue–perhaps a cookie cross-polination/contamination thing–in that I have both a Gmail account and a Google For Domains account that pre­vented my Dodge­ball account from asso­ci­at­ing fully with one or the other.  At any rate, I can’t log in with either of my accounts.  I can’t cre­ate a fresh new account because my phone num­ber has already been used.  I can’t delete the exist­ing account and start over because I’d pre­sum­ably have to log in or con­tact a human in sup­port to do so.

Basi­cally, I’m screwed and can no longer grow my Dodge­ball pool of friends.

Today, I started a Twit­ter account, but I’m not sure how much I’ll use it.  Dodge­ball and Twit­ter are sim­i­lar ser­vices with a lot of over­lap, but I really like how Dodge­ball has a very spe­cific pur­pose: to relay your loca­tion to your friends.  This lim­its the scope of the mes­sages you’ll receive, effec­tively reduc­ing quan­tity and increas­ing qual­ity.  Twit­ter, on the other hand, is anything-goes.  Open the flood­gates of mes­sages.  Regard­less of qual­ity, the quan­tity can be quite high, encour­ag­ing folks to turn off the SMS mes­sages for sheer annoy­ance rea­sons.  And with SMS turned off, you may not think of check­ing for updates as often.

I also have a Pownce account that I’ve had for months.  I like the inter­face on Pownce much more than Twit­ter, but the lack of an API and/or SMS inte­gra­tion means I don’t really use it.

Any­way, for those that want to friend me, my Pownce account and Twit­ter account are both named BrianEnigma.

Edited to add: Okay, so scratch all that unable to log in stuff.  I just tried it again, and although it has been bro­ken for months, it is mag­i­cally work­ing now.

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Tagged as: dodgeball