Everywhere you look online nowadays, there’s a new social network for a certain niche. Whether its for photographers, music lovers, dads, mums or even children - you are bound to find a website that you will feel comfortable with.

So when I got an invite to Footbo - a social network for football fans - my natural reaction was to sign up and see what it was all about.

The bullet points on the homepage sum it up quite well…

• Connect with your friends & other football fans from around the world
• Receive live scores, fixtures and personalized news
• Blog about your insights and emotions
• Predict games and challenge your friends in prediction leagues
• Read-up on and contribute to your favorite teams and players

The website relies quite heavily on user-generated content. If there are teams or players missing from the system, you just add them. It’s an interesting concept to get around the legal wranglings of the Football DataCo with their rules about publishing football data. Who owns the content? The user or Footbo? It would be interesting to see what happens when the 2008-9 season starts and the scores and fixtures become heavily used.

I also like how there are sections dedicated to leagues and teams, with content feeding in from other news sources and YouTube for videos (although with the current lawsuit between The FA and YouTube, I’m not sure how long that will last).

While the user interface is fairly intuitive, I have found the occasional “feature” that could do with some extra attention in terms of usability. For example, some of the consoles on your user page such as the friend and group requests could have worked better with some AJAX calls rather than entire page loads.

Only time will tell whether Footbo will survive in a social world dominated by MySpace, Facebook and Bebo but I seriously think with some good publicity in the right audiences, Footbo can really appeal to the commercial market of football. Football is one of the most valuable markets in the World with some of the strongest and most passionate communities you shall ever find. If that passion can be transferred to the Internet, and specifically to Footbo, there could be a real opportunity for Footbo to work.

After what seems like an age, I can finally announce one of the projects I have been pouring my time in to over the last few months. Not only was I content with working full-time at Yahoo! as well as running a fortnightly podcast, after the success of World Cup KickOff, it seemed only natural to follow this up with its European counterpart - Euro KickOff.

Next month, from 7-29th June, Euro 2008 will be kicking off in host countries Austria and Switzerland - a tournament of sixteen countries competing for the crown of Champions of Europe. While none of the “home countries” have actually qualified this time round (which I’m sure most England fans are still blaming Mr Mclaren for), I couldn’t let that dampen my intentions of delivering what seemed to be quite a popular service among football fans around the World last time round. There are still 16 countries from around Europe who will be following their teams religiously next month and would love to have a one-stop reference (and download) of the all important kick-off times.

The Team

Rather than go it alone on this project, I had a great team to work with to make sure we delivered a top quality service. Thankfully, from the success of World Cup KickOff, I had established a great friendship with Brian Suda so he was really keen to get involved and lend his hand on the technical background of the project.

I also realised it would make sense to bring in another developer on the project to spread the workload so I roped in Klaus Komenda from Yahoo! (who is also from Austria so also had knowledge of one host country too). I have worked with Klaus on multiple projects at Yahoo! and I was certain he had the ability to deliver a high-end product with super efficient code.

On the design side of the website, I asked fellow Multipacker Gareth Brown from One Black Bear to go wild and create an impressive and memorable design the users were sure to remember. I think you can agree the design is absolutely superb, bringing together the nature of the website as well as harnessing the locality of the event this time round.

The Website

So now it’s all designed, developed and out there in the open, what does Euro KickOff actually do? Well, it simply allows you to download all the kick off times of Euro 2008 in to your calendar, whether you use Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal, Mozilla Sunbird or your mobile device.

The fixtures are accessible in the generic ICS calendar file format so should work in most calendar applications. If your software is capable of subscribing to remote calendars, you can always subscribe to the Euro 2008 fixtures so they are automatically updated with final scores as well.

But rather than stop there, we’ve made it so the user can choose which fixtures they want to follow. Rather than just make you download all the fixtures, you can customize the fixtures by a chosen team or group, the later stages, venue or date. That way you only get the matches that matter to you.

Future Plans

We still have a few plans for Euro KickOff which will be released in the next few weeks.

We are currently working on a Developer API to access the fixture times of Euro 2008, allowing other people to build their own applications.

We are also hoping to release the website in other languages later this week (it seems quite cheeky to build a service in a language that none of the attending countries speak natively).

We are also in talks with quite a significant figure in the industry who want to collaborate on the project. More on that soon.

Spread The Word

So now it’s built, what now? Well, it just needs to be used.

I know many readers of this blog are from the UK so probably don’t have a massive interest in Euro 2008 this year. But think about this - won’t it be a lot more fun to support a team you’re not emotionally attached to and see how far they will go? Why not have a bit of a sweep stake with your friends or at work, pick a team from the pot for a quid and the winner at the end wins all the donations? You could use Euro KickOff to track your team to make sure you know when they are playing and have a bit of fun in the process.

You could also arrange when to meet with friends for a bit a social event around certain games such as your team’s fixtures, opening ceremony or big final. By having all the dates and times in one place, it will be a lot easier to arrange your visit to the pub, party or even flights to Austria or Switzerland. Any excuse for a few drinks…

 

Euro KickOff has been a really cool project to work on and I’m really proud of the finished product. The entire team have excelled themselves and I’m sure they all are very proud to see their efforts all come together. Fingers crossed for an exciting tournament now…

Not exactly the headline you’d want to see on a night when England had to deliver just a draw against group leaders Croatia.

But it was a dismal performance from our lads in white while the Croatians out-played, out-performed, out-classed us at Wembley tonight.

So where does this leave English football? What does it mean for Mr McLaren? What the hell are all the hooligans going to do next Summer while the rest of the continent enjoy watching their teams in Austria and Switzerland? More importantly, what does this mean for the follow-up to World Cup KickOff? Should I bother spending time developing a website that I wouldn’t even use myself?

Lots of questions and not many answers. It’s a time to reflect on the so-called Beautiful Game and what it means for “Engerland”. It’s the first time England haven’t been in a huge football tournament in 14 years (think back to World Cup USA in 1994) so maybe it’s time to give the team a chance to sort themselves out.

Commiseration blog post is over. Well done for trying England but it wasn’t looking likely from the start was it?

Update: I’ve just been invited to take part in a Football Fans Census survey regarding the England team. It might be worth sending your opinions as well.