Google acquired Dodgeball.com that brings social networking to mobile phones based in New York. However, there is no official response for the people at google but the site dodgebell.com posted a message at their site about the acquisition on Wednesday.

The service for Dodgebell works something like this: A person enters location on their mobile phones. A group of friends could receive text messages about the place where they could meet. In addition, friends of friends who are close also get the messages.

"Google realizes that expanding search to the mobile space can bring in a great deal of revenue," Yankee Group analyst Sui Li Walker said, "as opposed to offering a portal with a lot of free applications."

So the real question is, why did google brought a tiny company like Dodgebell.com, which was just started last year by two graduate students? Lets see what google has acquired recently: Picasa, blogger tool provider and recently Dodgebell. Is this aimed towards building of some type of portal in future like Yahoo or Google is thinking of using these services as the extension of its search engine? With the launch of Gmail, Google has made it clear that it understands the importance of communication tools and how it grabs people attention and time.

Google is quiet about its recent acquisitions. However, the interesting thing is that Google is slowly acquiring and developing best technologies, brands and a host of best services. In addition, for a company like Google, it is required to be on mobile phones too.

With the popularity of blogs, little is left for such social networking programs. However, if these social networking applications are combined with blogging, it makes a very powerful social networking package. In my opinion, this could be the reason for the acquisition. Yahoo 360, Blogger and Picasa, the war is on.

Amitabh Shukla (Personal blog for the author is at Seo Expert)