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Announcing StatPlot May 27, 2009 (Coverage: Hacker News | ReadWriteWeb) Check out StatPlot.com and let me know what you think! After creating a few hundred charts on StatSheet.com and taking requests for a dozen others, it became clear that I needed to put the power of creating charts in the hands of sports fans. No sense in me being the middle man. There are other services (Swivel, iCharts.net, Many-Eyes) that allow you to upload data and create a variety of visualizations, but these all suffer from the same issue. The average sports fan does not have access to quality sports stats to upload. With StatPlot, you don't need to bring your own data because you can use the expansive StatSheet database! Currently, NBA, College Basketball, NFL, College Football, and NASCAR are supported. More sports will be added soon (MLB and NHL are next). Let me know what sports you'd like to see. Features of StatPlot:
Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments StatTweets Report Card - Day 2 May 05, 2009 Yesterday, the response was pretty overwhelming to my blog post about Twitter shutting down StatTweets. And it got Twitter's attention. Within 30 minutes of the TechCrunch article @Crystal responded to one of my Twitter tickets. By the end of the day, @Ev replied to an email I sent him a couple weeks ago. Both re-stated their issues with my compliance with their TOS, so I re-stated my willingness to change the accounts as necessary. We'll see if anything comes from it. They've stated and restated their issues at least three or four times now (buying time?), so that should be really clear with everyone. What isn't clear are the actions they want me to take to rectify their issues. Now for some stats. The bit.ly link I used to point to my blog post in my original tweet resulted in 6,300 clicks. My tweet or some variation was retweeted over 1,000 times yesterday and there were 7,700 visitors to my blog article. The story was picked up by a variety of media outlets, blogs, and web services including TechCrunch, Mashable, FT.com, Hacker News, and TechMeme. Much like the last time I had a blog post picked up by TechCrunch and Hacker News, the distribution of traffic was roughly the same with Hacker News still dominating any other source by a wide margin: Hacker News: 1,500 visits TechMeme: 480 visits Twitter: 353 visits TechCrunch: 345 visits Google Reader: 295 visits StumbleUpon: 176 visits The Google numbers skew everything because those visitors could have been reading the TechCrunch article (or using the TechMeme feed) that linked to my blog. Ultimately, I wish it hadn't come to me writing the blog post, but with Twitter not responding to my repeated inquiries, I didn't have any other recourse. It is still yet to be determined if my strategy to restore StatTweets will work. Stay tuned! Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments Without Warning, Twitter Kills StatTweets (Businesses Beware) May 04, 2009 UPDATE: Read the Day 2 Report Card Show your support for StatTweets by retweeting this message. (Thanks for the 1,000 retweets) Check out the discussion at Hacker News and TechCrunch. More coverage at Mashable and FT.com. If you are new to StatSheet, learn more here.
Overview Back in December I created a new site for the StatSheet Network called StatTweets. In order to take advantage of the growing Twitter phenomenon, I wanted to create Twitter representations of the team pages you find on StatSheet (example here). (The StatSheet Network is all about trying to do interesting things with sports stats.) Instead of creating a single Twitter account and blasting every sport and team through it like so many large sports media companies do, I wanted to make up for Twitter's lack of filtering capabilities by creating accounts for each team page. So I did. My wife and I created 650 accounts over a long weekend for each NBA, NFL, College Basketball and College Football team. Then I plugged the Twitter API into the backend data processing I was already doing for StatSheet.com and started tweeting interesting stats, news, live score updates, point spread updates, etc. I even added the ability to retrieve stats dynamically via Twitter using the #StatMe hash tag. Read about it here. In just 4 months, the StatTweet accounts gained over 63,000 followers. And that's with me doing very lttile marketing or promotion of the accounts. Twitter.com went from driving no traffic to StatSheet.com to being the #2 source of traffic behind Google. The feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive (even from TechCrunch). Two weeks ago I noticed one of my accounts was suspended. Then I discovered all of the accounts had been suspended (actually they missed two of them: @NuggetsStats and @SunsStats UPDATE: Twitter just suspended these accounts now too, thanks for that). I opened a ticket with Twitter Customer Support and got back the following less-than-helpful response: Hi, The accounts were suspended for violation of our Terms of Service: 1. Copyright infringement 2. Mass account creation 3. Squatting Please honor Twitter's Terms of Service accordingly. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter. Cheers, Let me address each one of their issues: 1) Copyright infringement - They said because I used team logos I was infringing on copyright. I've talked to two lawyers and they don't think Twitter OR the teams would have a case. Why? A) the images used are very small and low resolution, B) I'm not pretending to be an official team account and C) there are dozens of other accounts using these logos on Twitter. The last point is perhaps most important. To have a successful copyright/trademark infringement case, you have to show that you are going after all known offenders. Do a quick search on "Celtics" on Twitter. There are 9 accounts using the exact same logo. And that's just the accounts with "Celtics" in the name. I can only imagine the total number of accounts using that logo would be at least 2 or 3 dozen. It is clear Twitter has singled me out in this case. That said, I would take down the logos if Twitter feels strongly about it. But guess what? They never asked me despite their own documentation stating they would work with accounts that are providing a service to the community: "Accounts created to help a community or provide information will be contacted with the appropriate steps to take to keep the account" 2) Mass account creation - Ok, they got me on this one. But what is the issue here in my case? I can understand you don't want spammers creating a bunch of unnecessary accounts, but each of my accounts represent a discrete entity (namely, a team's page on StatSheet.com). There are dozens of account networks on Twitter (e.g., BuzzTap), so why aren't they being targeted too? How many is too many? 5, 10, 100 accounts? And I didn't use any automated means to create the accounts (I wish). My wife and I created each account by hand over a weekend. 3) Squatting - This is the most bogus one of all. Because some of my college football accounts hadn't been updated in a couple of months, they accused me of "squatting" on the names. There haven't been any updates to those accounts because college football season is over! Those accounts are just as inactive as their pages on StatSheet.com. As soon as college football season comes around, the tweets will start back up. If inactivity is going to be the bar for what defines squatting, there are millions of squatters on Twitter. Conclusion I waited semi-patiently for 2 weeks in the hopes that Twitter would come around, but @Caroline and @Crystal (Twitter Support) have been unresponsive other than a couple of form responses. I'm sure now that Twitter is post-Oprah, my request is at the bottom of the priority queue. But aren't they biting the hand that feeds them? I'm providing a unique information service on Twitter and they shut me down without so much as a warning. To make it worse, they haven't even responded to my repeated inquiries. This doesn't bode well for other businesses that are trying to use Twitter. We are all at the whim of a Twitter Support person's interpretation of how you are using your accounts and how that complies with their TOS. To bring the Heat, you must Retweet! Unless someone at Twitter changes their mind, it doesn't look like the StatTweet accounts are going to be re-enabled. It is a shame because I was in the middle of a big update to the StatTweets.com site that was going to add a bunch of new features.
The only way I know to fight back is to have Twitterers show support for StatTweets by retweeting this message. Twitter hasn't listened to me, but maybe they would listen to YOU. Let's get #SaveStatTweets trending on Twitter!! Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments Game Flow on the Scoreboard page March 20, 2009 I got a query from someone today asking if they can find the lead safeness of a game in-progress. You can if you are following the StatTweets team account on Twitter where I tweet live game scores (e.g., @UNCStats) or after the game on statsheet.com, but not for in-progress games on statsheet.com. Well I just went a step further than that. I added a "Game Flow" link to the College Basketball Scoreboard. You can see the Game Flow for every game underway or that has completed. Part of each Game Flow chart are lines for lead safeness (if applicable). This gives you another way to monitor March Madness scores on a single page! Let me know what you think. Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments
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