I’m concerned how the sports news propagates on through ScreamingSports without UGC or deals with the major news sites.

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

http://www.yard...ardbarker/20174

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.fant...portsmatrix.com

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

-Rbowles

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

It also just completely crashed from the techcrunch traffic.

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.