Sportacular v1.3 brings social sports experience to the iPhone

After a long company-wide vision quest, we here at Citizen Sports are excited to announce that the latest update for our Sportacular app for the iPhone has been approved by Apple. The update is our first step towards a more social sports experience from your phone, something we’re passionate about improving. Sportacular 1.3 allows users to comment on live games, in real time, from anywhere in the world. You can also pick winners and see what the world thinks about an upcoming game.

If the social sports experience isn’t your thing and you just have Sportacular for fast, easy-to-use live scores and stats, you’ll still be stoked about version 1.3. You can now configure your auto-updates (10 to 90 seconds) via the Settings tab. This means that all scores, stats, play details plus the new NBA on-court view will automatically refresh at the interval you set. You’ll notice a nice improvement to general performance as well.

We will roll out improvements regularly over the next few weeks and months, so we would love to hear your feedback on what we should come next.  Right now we’re focusing on adding more teams and leagues (specifically Premier League, Champions League, and a few other European football leagues) plus enhancements to the social side of the experience. What do you want from your mobile sports application?

Onward,
Brian Mead

Brian is a Product Manager for Citizen Sports and enjoys pointing out how lame people can be when they try to get clever while writing these blurbs, including this one.

Scheduled Maintenance – 10/29 8:30pm Pacific Time

Hey everyone,

Our colo (the place where we keep our servers) is doing maintenance work tonight on their facility at 8:30p PT and will be shutting off power, most likely for about 2-3 hours.

This means all of our sites (Fantasy Football 2008, PROTRADE, Phillies Phanatics, Patriot Reign, Liverpool Kop…and hundreds more apps!) will be offline until they’re done.

We’re expecting to be back up around 11pm Pacific Time.

UPDATE: It’s looking more like 11:30pm Pacific (this is ultimately PG&E at work here, not us).

We’ll post additional updates if anything changes.  Sorry for the inconvenience!

- Citizen Sports

Week One is Done

Week one is done.  Brady is done.  Your fantasy team with Brady is done.  That’s all you need to know about the first week of the season.

OK, losing a player of Brady’s caliber is always going to hurt your fantasy team, but having it happen in week one means you can still recover.  Obviously you should try to pick up Matt Cassel, but you never know who else might come out of nowhere to put up monster stats.  This Derek Anderson last year.  Or Big Ben last year.  My advice is to find the guy who just lost Colston for 4-6 weeks and trade one of your WR for his backup QB (assuming it’s a decent player).   Just a thought.

As far as the Fantasy Football 2008 application goes, things went very smoothly in Week One with the exception of a busted stats feed from Stats Inc which caused some rookies and defenses to show no stats.  Those issues have been fixed and we will be rolling out the final Week One stats today, so it’s possible your score might change.  Let us know if you have any issues.

My not-very-bold predictions for top scorers by position in week 2:

QB – Kurt Warner

RB – Purple Jesus aka All Day aka Adrian Peterson

WR -Brandon Marshall

TE – Shockey

K – Folk

DEF – Cardinals

Who you got?

-Meadball

Rookie Scoring

You may have noticed that points for some rookies (including Felix Jones) aren’t updating. We’re working on the fix and everything should be up to date later today. Thanks for your patience. This won’t have any impact on your final score.

Citizen Sports

We are ready for some football

Is there anything more overused on the first week of the season than some version of “Are you ready for some football?” I doubt it.

That being said, tonight is the kickoff of the NFL season as the Redskins visit the defending champion New York Giants and we couldn’t be more excited. That means you’ll be able to track your fantasy players during the game with our free live scoring feature.

Want to talk some trash as the fantasy season gets started? Check out our new Smack Talk feature on your league pages. You can choose from the witty barbs provided by our staff or write your own, but please try to keep it clean.

I’d like to go out on a limb and predict a Redskins win tonight, 27-24. Who you got?

-meadball

Downtime

Hey everyone… We apologize for the downtime experienced earlier tonight. For about 30 minutes around 9pm ET, the application wasn’t functioning properly and it caused a number of drafts to crash. We realize this is horribly annoying and apologize for the inconvenience. If you were in a draft that was effected by the outage, please email us at ffsupport at citizensportsinc.com so we can reschedule your draft for whatever time you choose.

Thanks,
Brian Mead

Citizen Sports

Michael Phelps joins Fantasy Football celebrity league on Facebook

Michael Phelps announced in his recent update on his fan page that he’ll be playing Fantasy Football on Facebook with our Fantasy Football 2008 application. We’re excited to have him on board and can’t wait to see how the Olympic hero stacks up against SI’s Peter King, Brooklyn Decker, Billy Beane and others. Check out the full list of celebs… who do you think will win?

Doh!… And we’re back

Hey all,

We’re having a few issues with the application right now and we’re working furiously to fix them. Sorry for the delay and we’ll do everything we can to have the app back in working order as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience and we’ll have an update for you shortly.

- Citizen Sports

UPDATE: We’re back up and running smoothly. We’re really sorry for the downtime. Drafts that were in progress will have the remaining picks auto-drafted, but if you would like to re-draft at a new time you can shoot an email to ffsupport =at= citizensportsinc.com. Drafts that were slated to start during the brief outage were pushed back to 1:30pm PST. If you have any questions or concerns, please post them here.

Citizen Sports employees vs PROTRADE users

On Friday we held the draft for the annual Citizen Sports Staff vs PROTRADE; users fantasy league.  You can check out the draft results here.

Here’s a look at my amazing team (PT Staff Infection), a sure fire lock to win the league:

1.	(3)	Brian Westbrook	RB	PHI
2.	(22)	Andre Johnson	WR	HOU
3.	(27)	Brandon Jacobs	RB	NYG
4.	(46)	Calvin Johnson	WR	DET
5.	(51)	Roy Williams	WR	DET
6.	(70)	Kevin Smith	RB	DET
7.	(75)	Jonathan Stewart	RB	CAR
8.	(94)	Patrick Crayton	WR	DAL
9.	(99)	Eli Manning	QB	NYG
10.	(118)	Todd Heap	TE	BAL
11.	(123)	Brett Favre	QB	NYJ
12.	(142)	Pittsburgh Steelers	DEF	PIT
13.	(147)	D.J. Hackett	WR	CAR
14.	(166)	Phil Dawson	K	CLE

Here are some comments on few things that have been pointed out to me numerous times…

- On drafting three Detroit Lions players in a row: Yes, the Lions suck, but you have to go into each pick willing to take the best value on the board.  I’m a huge Calvin Johnson fan this year and didn’t think he would get back to me in the 5th, so I pulled the trigger on him with the 46th pick.  When Roy Williams was available on my next pick, I had him ranked significantly higher than the next best WR on the board, so I took him even though having two recievers from the same crummy offense isn’t ideal.  Kevin Smith in the 6th was also solid value as he is slated to be the starter in Motown and makes a wonderful third running back at the 70th pick.  So I guess I’m a Lions fan this season, which sucks, but I think my fantasy team will better with these fools.

- On having the New York QB duo of Eli and Favre:  I’m not sold on either of these guys, but as 9th and 11th round picks I’m OK with playing the match-ups.   The strategy was to make sure I had solid players at both running back positions and all three wide out slots, and I think it paid off.  I guess time will tell.

What do you guys think were my best/worst picks?

We got some nice press from the Washington Post about the Fantasy Football 2008 application, which you can read about here.   Over the weekend we passed 20,000 leagues created, which is also cool.

Good luck in your drafts!

-meadball from Citizen Sports

Live Drafts… Booya

Disclaimer: This blog and specifically this post do not reflect the opinions, views or classiness of Citizen Sports Network, unless I write something quasi-official sounding. These words are solely those of one rouge employee named Brian Clyde Rockefeller 2000 Mead III, aka meadball, and have not been approved, edited or proof-read by anyone. Thanks.

Yesterday we had our first live drafts which all ran fairly smoothly if you ignore Citizen Lucas’ wide receiver corps of Marshall, Chambers, and A. Gonz in one league. Expect more live drafts in the coming days.

I can’t wait for my first draft where I spend six hours on an elaborate draft strategy which then gets throw out the window when one of my man-crush receivers falls to me in the late second (Andre 1000 (Johnson), B-Eazy (Edwards) or Chad-Dog (Johnson)). Are those guys on everyone’s favorite players lists?

I was reading some article about draft strategy the other day – I think on footballguys.com which is a great site that we have zero affiliation to – and it explained that you can’t have “favorites” or “my guys” when you’re drafting since you won’t get them at their true value. OK, I understand this if you’re in a money league with $10,000 on the line (we don’t encourage or condone gambling of any kind (outside of Vegas)), but what’s the fun in passing up a guy you love rooting for just to get better value out of some chump like LenWhale?

No one is reading this anyway so I won

I’m curious where Billy Beane will stand on this issue in our Celebrity League as someone who makes a living out of going by the facts and not the feelings. He can do it on the big stage for the Moneyball A’s, but can he keep a level head with Brooklyn Decker picking right after him? We’ll see…

That’s all for now.

-meadball from Citizen Sports