Menace

Monday, 28th January 2008, 1 Comment »

The day Leaguist launched

I’ve, strangely, wanted to build a web application for picking the winners of various sporting leagues and events for ages, and so with my time off I decided to have ago at it. Thus today I launched Leaguist.

I really wanted to emphasis the fun and camaraderie that people have around watching sports, and the type of friendly rivalry that comes out of comparing points against each other. With that in mind I felt the interface had to be pretty simple, and the entire experience to feel really friendly.

With the ‘friendly mantra’ in place I’ve made some system design decision that are quite different to other systems I’ve used in the past,

• Picks are on a per game basis, rather than round - because believe or not some don’t care/know about all the games
• Picks can be made and changed one hour before kick-off
• You can see your friends and percentage picks before the game happens
• If you get busy and forget to pick a winner, the system will automatically pick the away team for a win over 12 points
• People, groups and game info is available without needing to be signed in!

Web 2.0 Sport

I definitely channelled the web 2.0 vibe with some aspects of the site, like groups having a javascript widget you can display on any other site. And I’m definitely thinking of more web 2.0 things like microformats and majority rules. I’m expecting to also do an end of league zeitgeist.

All going well I’m looking to expand the site beyond just the Super 14, and into other leagues and sports, which should be fun.

I should also thank James, James, Sam, Tim, Tim, Ruth and those without websites who let me use them as guinea pigs on the site.