Mobile Apps New Social Community

One of the things I want SportsFlash to embrace is the intrinsic community available to it. We use mobile devices to connect and communicate with others, and for others to find us, so why shouldn't its applications take advantage of that. Web 2.0 can be characterized by many things, but one thing that has emerged is social networking. The ability to connect with friends, colleagues, people we know well, and those that maybe a few degrees of separation away to help us share pictures, look for jobs, spread news, collaborate ... etc. I believe SportsFlash offers the ability to evaluate it's social network of league members, identified by their phone number, to enable relevant information discovery, connecting players and their sports interests, ... etc using social network analysis and other approaches. Some of the things we want to do with SportsFlash to enable community include (but not limited to) the following:

• Limit the data on the phone to only store the leagues you belong too. For information about your teams standings, the players statistics, messages being shared, ... etc, the phone will connect with the community to view/share.
• Use message boards to communicate with the community, one to many broadcast communication.
• Develop services (i.e. alerts, SMS, GTalk, XMPP, ... etc) to push relevant information to your phone, utilizing the relationships you create with others in the SportsFlash community, and your interactions in the league.
• In Version 1.0, player stats will be updated, monitored and mediated by the SportsFlash user community. This way it spurs more interest in monitoring and playing with SportsFlash.

Another interesting aspect is that the content will be constantly changing, and the tone, mode, atmosphere of the SportsFlash community will also be constantly changing, in some cases, evolving. This is important, because the algorithms we use to create a relevancy model for our community could also use evolutionary computing algorithms to track how the model is changing in our network analysis.

One term that always comes to mind, Continuous partial attention. In the context of Gen Y, SportsFlash will help with continuous partial attention, at least in terms of our love affair of sports, by supplying a convenient way to participate in a fantasy sports league community when it's convenient for you, or when SportsFlash tells you something interesting is happening.