March Madness Facebook app - my way

The NCAA’s annual men’s basketball championship tourney is in its third day; the field of entrants will be down to 16 by the end of the weekend.

This year, college hoopheads that double as Facebook users (like myself) have been able to track the progress of the tourney’s 65 teams with cbssportsline.com’s bracket management tool created for the social networking site.

It’s a small Web-based application that helps college hoops fans create and manage March Madness pools in the groups section of Facebook.

It is a fantastic little app; it eliminates the hassles of bracket management that come with a paper-based system; namely the manual collection of submissions and reading the blurry faxes sent to offices.

These factors and others have made life more difficult for a pool administrator or participant’s life in past. I wish I had access to such a creation years ago.

Anyway, this year I have been able to enter more pools and have had an easier time than ever tracking my progress to date.

There are however, a number of things I’d like to see in next year’s version of cbssportline.com’s Facebook app that I believe will help users and the company for that matter in order to push people to the bracket manager and keep them there. My suggestions are as follows:

1) allow pool creators to invite more than 18 people to their pools! Most Facebook users, at least the ones I know, have networks, er, friend lists that extend well beyond 18 friends. Why limit the . The larger the number of participants in a pool, of course, the greater the interest level; at least that’s been my experience. Perhaps there’s some internal reason why cbssportline.com or Facebook won’t allow more than 18 users per pool.

2) AJAX. Use it to post real-time scores of games. Currently, bracket managers have to visit sports news sites, such as cbssportsline.com to get scores. Users want access to monitor the progress of games on every web site they visit throughout the weekend. Why shouldn’t I be able to do as much while I’m checking out my bracket?

3) run ads alongside the bracket manager of an individual or have deals with e-commerce vendors to sell associated wares. CBS Sports’s online partners will love it; there’s incremental revenue gains to be made as well.

March 22, 2008 | Filed Under News Items and Commentary