There’s only one other group online as obsessive about constant feeds of information aside from Silicon Valley’s power geeks, and that’s sports fans. Geeks have RSS, sports fans have SMS. Tech heads have podcasts to their highlight reels. Fans have even spurred the development of their own kind of virtual world, the $2 billion cottage fantasy sports industry. There are a host of sites helping some 15-18 million fans follow their leagues, including Yahoo, ESPN, CBS, and a host of smaller operations. Fans play on 3 different teams on average.
Atlanta-based ScreamingSports is a new service from FSDashboard creating a social network for fantasy sports fans where they can manage their teams, regardless of where they are hosted. FSDashboard is releasing the site fresh off a $1.25 million round of financing from Mangrove Partners.
ScreamingSports lets you create your own personal fantasy sports profile (blog, pics, friends) and aggregate all of your fantasy sports teams by just dropping in your credentials. You can connect with other players, compete for points, and get updates on general sports news. For your teams, SS will let you know how they’re performing, what games are coming up, as well as last minute game breakers like injuries or expulsion. Any changes you make to you teams in ScreamingSports are reflected in the hosting site and vice versa.
ScreamingSports also adds features some fantasy sites don’t have. You can access your teams from a mobile phone for last minutes tweaks and even automate updates to your teams based on injuries.
We’ve seen a cadre of other startups cater to this crowd for big payoffs in the past. Wikia reportedly purchased ArmchairGM for $2 million. Time and Sports Illustrated acquired FanNation and paid about $25 million for a 40% stake its parent company. Rivals allegedly sold for a whopping $100 million.
Since they depend on third party sites for their users, Screaming Sports stands in a more tenuous spot than these other sites, who went it alone. However, it’s easy to see ScreamingSports launching their own network after reaching a critical mass, similar to Meebo launching their IM network after aggregating the major players.
Interesting I will check it out.
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Sounds like a wonderful idea. Now I nearly less see a web2.0 site about sports.
Will it survive? But I hope it will succeed.[...]
I love fantasy sports. Been trying to find something to do with my domain smack-talk.com for years now. Anyone?
All in one ROCKS. I love it.
Looks like a very good site but I hope that they will also go into other sports unless they are only targetting the US market.
WOW! Every fantasy sports player needs this site. This is awesome. Everything in one spot plus social networking. I’ve been looking for something just like this.
this has lawsuit written all over it.
Good to see Sports Web 2.0 sites doing well. We have recently launched http://www.sportstwo.com which is quickly becoming popular.
We’re sooo anxious to release our site to the public. In about 2 weeks, FSM will be unleashed on the sports world. =)
Looks like a decent site. It seems like all of these sports 2.0 sites’ biggest downfall is their user interface. Screamingsports, although not bad, also has a subpar UI.
The door is wide open for this niche. FantasySportsMatrix, although still held under private doors, seems to be by far the most promising and looks the most Web2.0-ish.
Screamingsports UI is pretty good actually. Very clean and not congested - refreshing even. I love the fact that I can manage my fantasy teams from there.
Looking at FantasySportsMatix images, I don’t see how lance thinks it’s promising as it doesn’t do anything that the other social network sites don’t already do. The UI on FantasySportsMatix looks like a repeat of MySpace - again, just going off of the images on FantasySportsMatix as the site is “under private doors”. How are images Web 2.0-ish? Web 2.0 is about being able to do something…
Man oh man… fantasy sports has exploded over the past few years - especially football. It seems like a buddy is asking me to sign up for a new pool every couple weeks.
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
I just entered my Yahoo fantasy baseball team, and while the import feature was first-class - and amazingly fast - many of the vital function pages once your team has been imported come up with errors, such as the match up page which I would think would be the most important page on the site… I presume that has live scoring? The free agent page has some FUBARed CSS, and the league info page also comes up with an error.
B Nut,
I apologize, you’re right - the images currently shown @ FantasySportsMatrix.com don’t do them justice as to what they have to offer. I was lucky to get in their private alpha tester group through a friend and have been really impressed.
Without blowing their covers too much, I’d say that they’re more like a Facebook for sports fans, rather than a Myspace, with a strong focus on user generated sports content.
Cool website and good news about funding!
I love how I tried to import my Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball team and I got a .NET error…sweet!
I registered with the site and immediately had an “importing issue” with the first team I tried to import from fanball.com. Then after I was able to successfully import an ESPN.com baseball team I found UI elements that were off in firefox. I tried to view free agents and received an ASP.NET default “remote errors off” error page. Not a very impressive visit to say the least.
This site is a joke–the team import feature scrapes provider websites for data. When those sites change their design, screamingsports will break. I don’t see how this is a legitimate business.
It also just completely crashed from the techcrunch traffic.
I have a little problem giving my often-used-and-linked-to-a-credit-card Yahoo ID/password for this. Am I paranoid? Well, yes, but TOO paranoid?
Hey all:
I’m Alec Peters, the CEO of Screaming Sports and I want to thank you for all your comments.
In reference to the technology issues around importing your baseball teams, our team is working feverishly on them right now. This is our first season doing baseball so ironing out a few kinks (Why we are still in Beta!). When there is an error on the site, our developers are notified immediately and most of the issues outlined above have been fixed. If you have any problems, email support@screamingsports.com and you will find you get a quick response from Shawn, our CTO and his team. In fact, everyone who gets an error should be getting an email from out CTO directly to let them know that their issue has been resolved. My apologies for the inconvenience!
In answer to Wes (Comment 5), yes we already are looking to add Soccer, and when we move to Europe, well, the UK alone has fantasy premiership, fantasy cricket and fantasy rugby! There are actually as many fantasy players overseas as there are in the US according to one survey.
As to Ori (comment 18) yes we do scrape for data, but we get our own stats feed (from Fanball) and so most of what a fantasy players is doing doesn’t require us to hit the fantasy site. Changing your roster is the only major action that requires us to interact with the fantasy site.
I can tell you that fantasy sports is a bit backwards when it comes to technology and few of the major sites have APIs. These are mostly big media companies (Yahoo, ESPN, CBS, Fox) and so getting them to get on the web 2.0 bandwagon is tough (heck, Fox is still dealing with the legacy of Passport), so yes, we are scraping those sites for data.
That being said, the last company I founded, Marketworks, did the same thing with eBay, Yahoo Auctions, Amazon auctions and others back in 2000, so that technology is something we have done for years. We actually helped eBay develop their first set of APIs once they realized how much value we drove for them, so hopefully we can do the same in the fantasy sports space. (When I left Marketworks in 2005, we were managing about 7% of eBay’s domestic auctions, so high transaction systems are something we have done before). And yes, all the top people from that company are now working at Screaming Sports.
Finally, Gardner G (comment 19), we handled people’s eBay and PayPal information at Marketworks so we take a great deal of pride in our ability to handle user information securely. We know that is very important.
Thanks again for all your comments and please let us know how we can make Screaming Sports better.
Alec
Don’t get me wrong, the fantasy stuff is cool and I signed up for football (actually worked too) but how is this web 2.0? TC is really lowering their standards. This should be written about in fantasy sports rag. Does that mean every hint of social network can get on TC?
i’m excited to use fleaflicker this year
its hard to compete with the big dogs; but if you do - you got a 80% chance of a big pay day…
-Rbowles
Hey Michael Vu arnt you just copying ballhype sportspyder and yardbarker? At least thats the impression I got from your screen shots. Seems like a lot of work to rehash stuff that already exists.
ScreamingSports has more to offer than the others from what I can tell. At least it has some unique features. The others are nicer to look at, but frankly it’s not something that hasn’t been done before (e.g. we did something like this at Sportingnews.com 2 years ago - I’ve since left).
Orin (who runs a very competent and exciting game BTW) is correct though - scraping pages is doomed from a technology standpoint. They will simply never be able to promise stability across all those sites. This is more than just getting eBay to play along. They have to get 5 eBay’s to play along. A much different and harder task.
Still, I wish him luck. Also I wish he’d put MLB.com’s Fantasy Open on the list of supported games
Jeff,
User submitted links, is in fact a part of our site. So in that regard, we offer something similar to Yardbarker and the likes. However, that is only one feature of our site.
We have put a lot of focus on usability and UI, and truly believe that there is nothing out there quite like the experience offered by FSM. We’re a few guys in a garage with a passion for sports and technology who put their sweat, blood, and every penny they had into this. For us, this is an obsession, - and we’re very optimistic that it will show.
If you haven’t already, please sign up for our beta - as we will be inviting a lot more people in over the next 2-3 weeks. Sorry to keep things under tight wraps. Being that we’re a bootstrapped garage startup, we have everything to lose against the big guys. Cheers!
Regards,
Michael Vu
http://www.fantasysportsmatrix.com
only thing worth mentioning from the site is their tagline: “fantasy sports on steroids”..what exactly does that mean? talk about not getting to the point. i’m more of a business guy myself and found it odd that they would market themselves that way. socially, it isn’t as if being “on steroids” is a good thing. it’s a serious issue and really should not be made light of.
Big Nate (comment #6) posted that exact same comment on Yardbarker.com:
http://www.yardbarker.com/mlb/.....rker/20174
Eugene:
To your comment, Big Nate is NOT an employee or shill of ScreamingSports. I forbid any of of employees from commenting on Tech Crunch. After some research, I found out that Big Nate is in fact a user of ScreamingSports. We are flattered that he likes the site, but of course concerned that he looks like a shill. Rest assured, he is not. As I said, company policy forbids employees other than myself from commenting on Tech Crunch and other sites like it.
Alec
Sorry, it’s not word for word the same as the comments posted on Yardbarker.com, but it’s still the same unquantifiable hype. The top news stories don’t seem to be automatically updated. As of July 20, the Mike Vick story is yesterday’s news and the NBA Ref Scandal is top news.
I’m concerned how the sports news propagates on through ScreamingSports without UGC or deals with the major news sites.
Good point Eugene, but I think their focus is fantasy news more so than top news and they look to have deals with news sites as I actually am getting fantasy news from the site on my teams.
Seems a little cumbersome to me, but maybe the hardcore guys who have 15 teams will like it…
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Has anyone actually got this to work? I can change the lineups on my Sportsline Baseball team but thats about it. Can’t make trades, add free agents.