The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘foobo’

As the world’s most popular sport, soccer (or football as it is called in most of the world) has no shortage of devout fans, and with the World Cup coming up in just over a year, that popularity is set to skyrocket once again. So it’s no surprise that social networks dedicated to the sport have emerged that are looking to capitalize on this massive market. One of these is Footbo, a soccer-centric social network that has just closed a $1 million funding round from Pitango Venture Capital.

Since launching last June, the site has built up an international audience of 240,000 across English, Spanish, and German-speaking countries. The site has also recently implemented Facebook Connect, and is working to further increase exposure through a number of widgets.

While Footbo is touted as primarily a social network, it offers a handful of major interlocking components. Its social network includes standard functionality like allowing users to connect with friends, participate in groups, and message each other. There’s also a collection of data and statstics of professional teams from 70 international leagues, including scores, standings, and fixtures (schedules). The site also has over 50,000 team and player profiles.

Users can interact with this data through prediction games (which have also been integrated into Virgin Media), customized news feeds, and subjective grading of how their favorite teams fare during a game, which they can then compare to other users. Users can also add their own content, including blogs and wiki pages revolving around players and teams. Members can also use the Footbo platform to create their own teams and leagues for recreational play.

Footbo competes with a number of other soccer-centric sites, including ESPN’s Soccernet.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Say you have a group of individuals who all want to tweet from one account — right now, that’s a pain. You have to give everyone the password to the one account and have them log out of their own account and into this new one to use it. And even then, how do you know who is sending what tweet? You’d have to manually insert your own Twitter name at the end of your post or something along those lines. Now there’s a much easier way, and it comes thanks to a demo app.

Tata-tweet allows you to feed multiple Twitter accounts into one feed. When you do this, it will auto-append the name of the person tweeting to the end of the message. That means no more logging out from your account to send from the group account — and no more having to copy and paste the tweet if you also want to send it from your own. You can see this in action on the Y Combinator’s founders group account.

But there’s a slight catch: Using this app will cost you $0.99 a month. Yes, it’s a premium Twitter app. While those are a dime a dozen on platforms like the iPhone, they’re not so common on the web. And a monthly payment one is almost unheard of. But Tata-tweet is able to do it thanks to Tipjoy’s Twitter Payments API. This service extends Tipjoy’s social micropayment structure to the red-hot Twitter platform. And Tipjoy created this app to show exactly how it will work.

Pipping your accounts into Tata-tweet is easy, but you will have to have a group account set up that all of these tweets will be sent from. Once you have that, you click on the sign-up button and your TipJoy account is billed. It doesn’t require a credit card because TipJoy assumes that you’re good for the money. A word of caution: TipJoy will tweet out that you owe $5.94 (you have to sign up for 6 months at a time) for creating the new group account.

Tata-tweet is entirely open source, and you can grab the code at github. Tipjoy is running a contest through June 1 for the best apps created using this new Twitter Payments API — and according to TipJoy co-founder Ivan Kirigin, there are already plenty of good ones since Twitter is featuring it in the gadget box on the main Twitter homepage.

Kirigin bets that a lot of premium Twitter services will start popping up soon to make money on the popular platform. Yes, that will probably happen before Twitter actually makes any money.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The poll results from yesterday are in, and it isn’t even close. 80% of you think Craigslist (46 million US visitors) is more important than South Carolina (4.5 million residents). Background on the conflict is here.

The numbers are obviously not statistically relevant since TechCrunch readers, a tech savvy lot, are going to be more likely to side with Craigslist. But South Carolinians (or whatever it’s supposed to be) apparently aren’t too thrilled with their state, either. The Palmetto Scoop, a popular conservative blog in South Carolina, held their own poll today and asked “Which is more important, 2,500 TechCrunch readers (the total number that had voted as of this post) or enforcing the law?”

As of right now, 60% of the 124 respondents say, well, TechCrunch is more important than enforcing the law (which isn’t really what the Craigslist issue is about anyway).

Your conservative voters have spoken, Mr Attorney General McMaster. We’ll draw up the secession paperwork for your signature.

Update: Just because it’s awesome:

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Oh, Internet! This here is a silly video showing a future version of the Amazon Kindle, the Kindle 9 XXXD. Why, it’s so big it can’t possibly be practical to use!

And, for the record, I could have sworn I saw this same concept—examine what a current gadget will look like in the future, to humorous results—on the Onion last year.

Still, cute.