Fantasy sports leagues are big business, and all the big portals have their own products (see examples at ESPN, FoxSports, AOL, and Yahoo). The sites are increasingly dropping user fees as competition heats up. However, complaints continue that the sites can’t handle the massive traffic and computational load generated from users - ESPN and FoxSports were often criticized in particular during last year’s football season.
New Jersey based FleaFlicker is a “new web” fantasy football alternative. It’s free (ad supported) and has an arguably richer feature set than the existing options. See the tour here. If you are looking for the best fantasy football site out there as the new season starts, check it out. There are a number of public leagues that individuals can join, or you can start your own league. One criticism - they really need to get the FAQ/Help section completed - it’s currently a blank page.
FleaFlicker was created by Ori Schwartz.
On a sports-related note, I’m hoping Italy wins today’s World Cup Finals in Berlin. I won’t be able to deal with Jeff Clavier’s extreme-French smugness if France pulls it off. (kidding, Jeff, just kidding). 
Update: Oops, sorry Jeff.
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lol, the service seems great, but that logo! that’s gotta go! lol
ArmchairGM.com users have been developing a rules system for the ultimate Fantasy Football league for the last six weeks. I don’t think FleaFlicker can handle it, simply because it can’t handle auction leagues and long-term player contracts. It also has trouble dealing with a lot of the customization, because it relies on radio boxes and the like (i.e., I can’t create both a RB/WR position and a WR/TE position).
It looks nice and the ajax makes it a better service than Yahoo et al, but the changes are mostly cosmetic. If they want to launch themselves past those leagues and into the realm of true customization, they need to think outside the box on a fantasy football level, not just on a technological level.
Then again, once someone starts doing that, I can’t command a nice fee for writing fantasy football articles!
Oh, yeah, I linked to the rules in my “Name” if anyone wishes to read them.
Extreme French smugness ? WTF ? Like putting an “Allez les Bleus!” everywhere ?
It will be “Allez les Blancs” tonight… ! Or maybe you wanted to please Mike
You have to check out Protrade (www.protrade.com) started by none other than the main character of the book “Bringing Down the House” with an advisory board that includes former coaches, atheletes and executives from various professional sports leagues. While it is not a free, ad-supported business, it does provide a unique fantasy sports experience allowing users to trade atheletes like stock. It also attempts to address some of the challenges some of the fantasy sports sites face by tracking past performance to predict future performance and distributing dividends.
I don’t work for the company .. just a loyal user ;).
That is one confusing interface. I have not checked out the competitions offerings but there is nothing inviting about that interface.
Alan: Which site?
I’ll give a FleaFlicker league a try this year, of course, because I’m a junkie. It doesn’t seem too difficult, but I’m just not seeing the advantages.
Oh, and if the advantage is in the “advice” it gives you, run away. The advice it gave Michael (”your best move is to draft QB Manning, Peyton”) is atrocious.
Agree to Peter - logo from previous century
Comoon - ask advice to designer or at least to people who has seen more than computer screen in his life.
what’s the catch here? are there ads? how are they paying for hosting and stats (big $$). i use a similar service to run my league (not one of the “big guys”) but the developer says he has to charge to cover hosting and the stats.
Are we going to see some IP suits over licensing similar to MLB vs. CBC (http://tinyurl.com/rr3mn)?
We are trying something a little different at http://www.fanlete.com. Not the full blown out fantasy leagues, but for those that want something a little simpler. Our competitions are basically like march madness brackets but for any sport, for any games, in any combination, at anytime. And of course we’ve thrown in some social networking to make it more interesting.
I couldn’t agree more about the fleaflicker logo….I am definitely not a designer but that is pretty repelling. It’s good to see a group trying to improve on the existing fantasy products out there. There is a lot of room for improvement over Yahoo and ESPN.
are not they late a little? world cup is over:(
I think site was planned to go out in the beginning of world cup.
Elvirs,
Ah, no, it’s for American Football, not the other kind. Sorry if my last paragraph threw you off.
What is this thing called the “World Cup?” Is it a big cup that different countries use to drink from. I’m not following.
I think the logo is kind of cool actually
ITALIA!!!!!!
Ouch. Poor Jeff.
Bulding fantasy sports games on the web is one of the more challenging applications you can develop. The dizzying array of complexity introduced by obscure drafting, lineup, waiver, trade and playoff rules needs to be married to a transactional roster and statistical system that not only has to be perfectly correct, it needs to be updated in real-time while potentially millions of users are accessing the site.
Think of it as a stock market portfolio tracker where not only do you get to set the rules in terms of how stocks are bought and sold, but you have your own private view of the data that is unique to ten or twelve individuals. Then stream it all in real-time, and provide historical stats back to the beginning of time.
It can certainly be done, as we’ve seen by the sites you mention (and *ahem* CBS SportsLine *ahem* who have arguably a much richer feature set) but it it is Hard to Get Right. And users generally have zero tolerance for mistakes since money is often on the line.
Best of luck to FleaFlicker and anyone else that tries to break into this space, but if you, I suggest you buy yourself a lifetime supply of Jolt — you’re going to need it, especially around the beginning of September and on every Sunday thereafter!
I agree with Peter Pezaris about fantasy sports being difficult to code. AJAX is invaluable for the trickiest part of building such a site, which is the live draft code. That’s what we used to build FanFooty last year.
Interesting comment about competition causing the operators to start offering free services a lot more. For FanFooty we’ve had to introduce fees this week for the first time to cut down some of the massive demand we’ve had for our services in the as-yet-undeveloped Australian market. You have to make a choice between dollars and traffic, and you have to keep on refining that choice as circumstances change. Sportsline vacillated many times between free, paid and a combination of the two before settling on their current all-paid model.
Mike, I guess you are happy now that Italy won and French lost.
Jeff i suggest we boycott now TechCrunch
Actually, while watching the game I found myself wanting France to win. Funny.
hey, i used fleaflicker last year, and although you don’t have the level of news per player that you may find at a sportsline…. the free services and customizeable scoring is fantastic.
I am looking for a new site to host my league’s home page next year as CBS Sportsline has completely gone to pot. The new keeper function(which my league has used for 7 years) was a total failure. The online draft room was inoperable, and we have guys out of state that had to be on the phone for over two hours long distance. And to top it all off after manually inputing every last player for 12 teams, the page reset, forcing me to spend another two hours yesterday doing it all over again. We have put up with a slow gamecenter for a few years hoping they would upgrade their server, but this is it. Goodbye CBS, I hate you so much.
Oh yeah- and after three of us writing legnthy complaint letters asking for some explaination…. nothing. 3 days and 3 more complaints later…..still nothing. CBS really cares for thier customers, really, alot.
Did some one over here heard about the PLAYspex.com project?
Is’ Kind of a Secret new project in the field of the Fantasy Sports that suffers from not being to much innovative since it was invented it sounds interesting if some one over here Knows more about this please comment
Never heard of it, but I came across a pretty original fantasy sports website that is also free: FantasySportsStocks.com.
It is like a stock market, but instead of trading companies…you get to trade sports teams. I’ve been playing a few weeks…the stock values go up & down depending on team performance. Pretty cool concept.