In reaction to “Taking a look at existing football social network websites”

22Nov09

I’ve received a couple of emails in reply to this post about existing SNS for football from some of the companies whose sites I looked at. I want to make it clear that I looked at them from a personal perspective (I had stated this in my original post too, put that part in bold now). I realize that there could be some confusion about this.

Of course I tried to be as objective as as possible but some of it is also my opinion (subjective), what I thought about the existing social networking sites on football. I’m a football fan and I wrote down what I did or did not like about the websites. I also made some observations. These observations are perhaps based on a limited amount of time I spent on these websites. I believe that I gave every website more time than an average new user would. New users will also only invest a limited amount of time into a new website. If they don’t like something soon after browsing to the website they will leave. When looking at these websites I also kept in mind what I learned about social networking sites so far (from research papers for example).

Someone pointed out to me that I treated all these football SNS as if they were finished. Of course, creating these kind of websites is an ongoing process but users won’t start using your site for what you have planned, but for what your site offers right now.

I reformulated my part on yourleague.be. I realize it was formulated in a bit of a harsh way and I’m very sorry about this. I am fairly new to blogging and I was mistaken not to elaborate more on what I meant. My part on yourleague.com was too short. I still have the same opinion on yourleague.com but I’ve tried explaining it better now. I’m sure I’ll make more mistakes in the future but I’ll try to be more careful in the future.

I want to end this post by saying that I do appreciate the people who developed existing football SNS. I hope I didn’t give the opposite impression. I probably have a different view on football SNS than many of the people developing them. Of course I respect other people’s views and opinions. I still believe there aren’t that many good football SNS yet. I do realize that people developing these sites are working hard to try and get their site where they want it to go. It is not my intention to discourage people from using these websites.

In the near future I’ll start developing a football SNS of my own for my thesis. Of course I hope it will be successful but realistically most of the websites people launch are not successful. I do not claim to know better what works for football SNS. I do believe I pointed out a lot of things that are not working on the websites I looked at. When developing my football SNS I will ask my users what works and what doesn’t (as I don’t know better

) and I’ll do my best in creating something good.