Hi HN: We just launched FanPulse this morning! It's been an awesome ride so far in the Summer 2010 batch with YC! Please give us any feedback you may have, we hope to build this out so you guys will love it.
I'm using it to watch France vs Uruguay right now (not logged in). At least, I think I am. I'm not entirely sure whether it's started yet. Is that supposed to be a game clock? It updates very rarely...
Other comments:
1. It was listed as "Uruguay at France", which doesn't make any sense... I assume that was designed for American sports where there's always a home and away team?
2. I don't really care that some guy checked in and earned one point, but that's what the feed seems to be made of right now. Nor do I particularly care that someone picked someone to win.
3. Nothing seems to be updating properly -- I'll chalk that up to an overloaded server.
4. I assume that one need not be physically present at the match in order to "check in"? Perhaps this should be made clearer.
Ultimately I probably don't care enough about sport to be your target market, but it would be nice to have a service like this so I can follow the few sports I do follow (pretty much limited to the World Cup and the Formula 1) which I can't get on TV.
1. Yup, the "at" is basically for the regular season pro teams in American sports. We'll be fixing this soon for all other situations
2. If the guy was your friend, would that be more useful? Like in real life?
3. The server is OK, we haven't implemented any polling yet to the page. It started off as a quick check-in, leave, and come back tool early on. Our roadmap includes a smart decaying poller that will update the page often. A lot of our users now just refresh, nobody's complained too much yet, but we definitely need to get that in ASAP.
4. Definitely need something that says: "You can be anywhere!"
Thank you for trying it out and giving us the feedback even though you aren't a huge sport fan. We appreciate it!! Hopefully we can cover more big events like World Cup, Olympics, Formula 1, etc. where you'll use it.
Great to hear you want that! Our pro-account users (which is free when you invite 5 friends btw), will be given much more than the basic updates we have now.
We're fleshing out all those features (play-by-play) and more very soon.
Some other cool stuff we'll notify you about are really close games that are almost ending, big comebacks, or blowouts/upsets from you or your friends' favorite teams.
Love to hear what other specific notifications you'd like to see!
We love avid sports fans, definitely send us an email with anything else you'd like. We hope to make something you guys really like.
My Facebook feed is filled with people rooting for soccer teams. When you pick the winner of a game, does this post to your Facebook wall with the flag/logo of the team? That would probably be pretty viral right now.
The "find friends on Facebook" page isn't working.
If you check-in or pick a team, you are given the option to connect to Facebook. It will then give you a preview of the cross post once you're all connected.
Let me know if that seems confusing (it definitely might be). Great feedback!
