But I’d argue that hardcore sports fans following their teams/sports will turn out to be a better membership base than a bunch of random people following updates by people they haven’t seen face-to-face in years.

Niche Social Networks will prevail over general sites like Facebook, Bebo, and Hi-5.

First of all, this is not advertising as the website is not live yet (and sorry if you think this post is off topic, in this case just ignore it !), I only would be interested to get your opinion on the project I am currently working on: a football social network (www.footbolea.com) that will be (I believe) a bit different from the existing ones.
Its main feature will basically be a game commentary module that will permit users to commentate football games from their mobile and “followers” to take part into the discussion around the games they are currently following.
You may say that there is nothing new compared to existing media websites live commentaries, but I think there is potential here as -amongst others:
- anybody will be able to commentate a game (vs games commentated only by journalists)
- will permit to follow lower division clubs which do not get coverage
- would permit to follow foreign leagues in your own language which may not be covered in your country,
- etc.

Thanks !

I could elaborate a lot more on this, if needed.

We believe there’s ample room for competition in this sector, and will ultimately just lead to bigger, better sites from us all.  

We hope to be testing the VC water ourselves pretty soon, so Kudos to footbo on the latest round, and best of luck.

Vlad,
Footytube.com (we’re too busy to have job titles)

No community? I don’t wanna turn this into a my willy is bigger than your willy slanging match, but you clearly haven’t looked around much, the place oozes community interaction, you only have to look at the comment counts on latest matches to work that out. Footbo is dead by comparison.

Or perhaps you’re idea of a rich community experience is walking through a silent graveyard in the middle of night? If so, then you may have a point.

I think if anyone here works/owns a football site it is you Jim (and we can all guess which one it is from your two clearly biased and outlandish comments).

@Jim

I don’t own or work for any of these sites. I just say which ones I like as a fan.

Another site that has come up here, the new footytube beta, I don’t believe has been given the attention it merits.

It was a long while before I even realized footytube 2 was in public beta, they seem to have kept it oddly low-key. I picked it up from Oscar Karlsten’s twitter and review (for anyone interested: http://www.osca...m/footytube-20/)

I have to say, like Oscar, I was pretty shocked after signing up to see what an amazing job they’ve done and how much it has matured from the original wordpress blog (which hurts my eyes). The new version is quite simply a beautiful example of what web 2.0 is all about, and in my opinion the guys behind it are WAY ahead of the curve in terms of innovative features, both community-wise and in terms of content aggregation, they really have set the bar for these types of sites very high indeed, and I expect the site will explode when it comes out of beta. I just hope their servers don’t go with it

Which brings me back to your comment Jim. From what I can tell from the footytube aboutus page the venture was unfunded. Which begs the question, if they can do so so much with so very little, then I wonder what the original $1m footbo raised was spent on?

Was it the celebrity blogs and endorsements that you’re evidently so proud of? If so, I would profer that the money would have been more wisely spent had they focused on the core USP – i.e. developing actual useable community features (rather than wasting money on throwaway articles from celebs). That’s what popbitch is for

Anyhow, good luck to them, let’s hope they get it right with the extra $1m

I tried back in the day to play around with the other football networks, but they didn’t do it for me…

In order to truly enjoy and appreciate OleOle you need to give the site as much information about yourself as you can (favorite teams, players, location..etc) and it will personalize the home page for you.

There is also oleole.com which is the biggest football social network. Zefanclub.com & myfoot.fr (in france)

Checked out OleOle before, have a profile there in fact. It’s a very fragmented network and doesn’t even come close to having the social features that Footbo has. You can’t really compare the platforms like-for-life – Footbo kicks OleOle’s ass.

There’s a much more professional football prediction platform called BetUknow that you should check out at http://www.betuknow.com.

Many other blog networks, like Sportingo for example, have posts that are much better written.

OleOle has great content but it’s little hard to digest it, messy design IMO.

Also, FootyTube has done a great thing with connecting with the fans although it’s more clips search engine but it has got some great features http://beta.footytube.com/