IDEA #50 – Fantasy Sport League Widgets
By Steve Poland • April 6, 2007
First off, I’m the worst person to be even suggesting this idea — because I haven’t participated in a fantasy sports league since 1997 probably. But I know it’s a big business online.
Maybe this already exists, but what about someone creating a distributed fantasy sports league where widgets are involved. And I could place the widget on my MySpace page, and people could see my picks, latest trades, latest scoring. And bloggers / communities, could get people together for their own fantasy league within their community — and prizes could get awarded possibly. Maybe there could also be quick 1-day or 1-week fantasy contests — where you select players for a single game, or a single day’s games, etc.
Anyhow, the whole thought of distributing fantasy sports across blogs, MySpace profiles, community message boards, etc. Users would all have profiles at your website and could go head-to-head with each other, see who’s from their location, etc.
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6 Responses to “IDEA #50 – Fantasy Sport League Widgets”
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That’s a cool idea. But I think it’s one of those where if you did it, the technology is so easy to clone that established fantasy league sites (ESPN, CBS… I use Yahoo! for my current baseball league) would offer widgets very quickly. Yahoo! especially would seem likely to steal that idea as they are open to “web 2.0ey” things like blog widgets.
That is a really neat idea, though.
I had actually thought of something similar to this idea about a month ago. The main problem I saw with this idea is the potential problem of gaining permission to re-use the information within their league. I don’t exactly know what their Terms and Conditions says but it may violate that.
If you can get by that, then the next hurdle would be parsing the information across hundreds to thousands of different fantasy websites.
I really can’t believe that there is nothing like that out there. I read (not sure where) that the average income of a fantasy player is ~70-80k. Great market.
Hey Steve, we’re on our way for the Fantasy Celebrity Leagues:
http://www.fafarazzi.com/widgets.php
I’ve been using MyFantasyLeague for several years and I love the level of customization (not to mention tech support) even compared to the corporate giants in fantasy (ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, etc).
They’ve had their data available via XML for a couple years already: http://www.myfantasyleague.com/help-nojs/advancedcustomizationhowto.html
I also used their Google gadget last year for basic live scoring and standings.
I am suprised the bigger companies haven’t done more with this yet. Fantasy sports (football in particular) has grown exponentially the last few years.
The stumbling block I’ve come upon while trying to build mash-ups for fantasy leagues is the paucity of data freely available about the actual games. The NFL and MLB are pretty tight with the rights to game data.