SocialRoster Blog

Moving to a More Open Platform

Image by akakumo via Flickr

This winter was a busy one for Socialroster.  We had our first paying league Sobo Shuffle, we rolled out several updates and we’ve quadrupled our user base in the past 2 months.  We’ve also learned a ton from our users that used our Solo Team Manager and are currently in registrations for a handful of leagues in Baltimore, NYC, and Long Island.

That said, we’ve decided to make some changes to 1. make sure we are ahead of the curve technology wise and 2. make sure we are making tools and systems that are valuable to you and make your lives easier and cost less to operate or participate in recreational leagues and events.

So this is what we have coming in the future:

Technology :

1. We’ve decided to move from dedicated hosting over to a cloud computer service called Mosso.  This will enable us to be more nimble, cut fixed serving costs and eventually allow an API for developers to pull info out and push info into our platform.

2. We’ll also be making some changes on the back end that will prevent a lot of smaller bugs from happening.

Features:

1. Facebook!!! - in the next week or so we will be rolling out Facebook Connect and a Socialroster Facebook App as well.  This means that you will be able to log into SocialRoster with your Facebook login and as a player and captain you will be able to do everything on SocialRoster within Facebook!  You will also be able to update wins, losses, and whether you’re playing or not playing in a game in your facebook status.

2. League and Team Pages - We are currently undergoing a project to re-vamp all league and team pages so you will have more tools, controls, and features to spruce up your team page and it will function more like a blog or news site about your team where Commissioners and Captains can report the goings on in your league and team and players will be able to comment and share.

3. Widgets and RSS Feeds - We are also currently working on building out widgets and RSS feeds for games and team and league information so you can snag your schedule and put it on your iGoogle page, your Myspace page, RSS hompages, or your myYahoo page.

4. Broadcast to other Sites - In addition to a more open platform to help you put information IN to Socialroster, we want other sites to be able to get information OUT of SocialRoster more easily.  We will be trying to build turn-key solutions so that you can export upcoming games, events, registrations, league, and team updates out to sites like Eventful.com, Outside.in, Twitter, Wordpress, Blogger, and others like that.

Just to set expectations most of these features are in development or in planning right now so most of them are a couple months out but I wanted to get the information out there so feel free to give us your feedback, ideas, questions or comments by sending us a message on Twitter @socialroster or email us at help or submit a feature request as we are always interested in your commentary.