Comments on: IDEA #50 – Fantasy Sport League Widgets

By: Jekke

Jekke — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:00:34 +0000

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.

By: Phil

Phil — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:43:20 +0000

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.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 04:37:28 +0000

Hey Steve, we’re on our way for the Fantasy Celebrity Leagues:

http://www.fafarazzi.com/widgets.php

By: Jeremy Kandah

Jeremy Kandah — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 21:42:50 +0000

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.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 18:32:04 +0000

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.

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 18:28:54 +0000

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.