I’m taking a timeout from Uptick Sports. There. I said it.
Over the past two years, this personal side project of mine — an NFL fantasy football stock market — has totaled over 6.2 billion shares of stock traded. Trading volume increased by 188% in 2010 to 4.6 billion shares, up from 1.6 billion shares the prior year. What mattered more to me than the growth, however, was the fun that I had connecting with people who share my passion for fantasy football.
The Empire Badge will have to wait.
When the 2010 season ended, I felt energized, and I set about designing improvements to the stock market. I created a set of badges that traders could unlock through specific achievements, in order to add an additional game layer to the stock market experience. I also began work on an improved user interface, and collected bids for iPhone and Android apps in order to provide a more mobile-friendly trading platform.
But the NFL lockout that followed last season diverted my attention away from the process of making improvements to the Uptick Sports website. During that time, I also started a new role that I really love. I’m passionate about the digital strategy work that I do now, and I find that the line between personal and professional time is increasingly blurred. I simply enjoy spending my free time doing research and work related to my career instead of programming new stock market functionality and keeping track of NFL roster changes.
So, while it’s tough for me to come to the conclusion that a timeout is, in fact, necessary, I’m taking one. Uptick Sports will most likely make a comeback, however, in a form that provides a better user experience on mobile devices. It just won’t happen this year.
In the meantime, I’d like to thank the traders that have made managing Uptick Sports so enjoyable. It’s because of your insights — through both your trades and your interactions — that I’ve had more fun than usual with fantasy football over the past two years. Let’s stay connected! I’m always willing to join a new league, so hit me up with an invitation if you’re in need of an extra league manager. Just be forewarned that I may have to employ Zaarly to find someone to sit in on a live draft.
Zaarly may have just saved my fantasy football team.
With less than 24 hours to go before my league’s fantasy football draft this past weekend, I faced a big problem. The draft coincided with a lunch date that my wife had scheduled with several friends (she had scheduled it weeks in advance). The conflict stood out like a sore thumb on my Google Calendar, and yet, I had somehow managed to miss it. To make matters worse, my son’s hockey practice was scheduled at the same time. Three events. One time slot.
At this point, I had a few options:
- Bail out on the draft, thereby forcing my league mates to scramble to find another manager on short notice (kind of a jerk move — not something I’d want to do to @LaurenC7)
- Ask my son to skip his hockey practice and play at home while I drafted my team (high opportunity cost given the price of ice time — also bad parenting)
- Negotiate with my wife to miss part of her lunch (wasn’t going to happen)
- Find a substitute to draft for me (tough to find someone to give up their valuable time)
Zaarly to the rescue
That’s when I turned to Zaarly, a service that pairs up people who need help with a variety of tasks with bidders who are willing to take on the tasks for a fee. Think of it as an eBay for services. Zaarly launched back in May and has both iPhone and Android apps, as well as a web-based app that can be launched via Facebook. The service focuses on connecting buyers and sellers of services within specific geographic markets (i.e. San Francisco buyers receive bids from sellers in San Francisco, New York buyers receive bids from sellers in New York, etc.).
I quickly downloaded Zaarly’s app onto my iPad and HTC EVO devices and posted a job. I offered $21 under the listing “Sit in for me on my fantasy football draft.” Surprisingly, within a couple of hours, I had responses from two people who were willing to take on the job. One bidder backed his bid with credentials, stating that he had won his 16-team league the prior season. The other bidder took care to ask about the players I wanted, which ones I wanted to avoid, and which “sleeper picks” should be targeted in the latter rounds of the draft.
I went with the second bidder, whom I provided with instructions to nab both Jamaal Charles (RB, Kansas City) and Larry Fitzgerald (WR, Cardinals) for me if they were available early on during the draft. I quickly paid via PayPal (Zaarly also has options for cash payments and credit card payments via the app) and then exchanged a few emails with the provider to cover details such as the draft format and time (I also implored him to avoid drafting a kicker until the last round).
Just like that, the transaction was done, and my problem was solved.
On draft day, I received an email from the provider to let me know that he’d drafted my team and had even managed to secure both Charles and Fitzgerald. All in all, a surprisingly good experience — I had a solid fantasy football lineup, my wife went to lunch with her friends, and my son made it to hockey practice.
It’s increasingly rare for an app to give me that “Oh wow, I LOVE this app!” feeling. Foursquare did it when it was released, as did the Monocle feature from Yelp’s mobile app. And now Zaarly has joined that group, with its easy, simple experience for offloading tasks. If I win my fantasy football league this year, I’ll have Zaarly to thank for the crown.
Like 20 million or so others over the past month, I’ve been getting to know Google+, the new social project from Google. I’ve created a handful of Circles, sought out people to follow, and pondered the future ramifications for brands (including my employer).
All very interesting, to be sure. I’m a sucker for new social networks, apps, and shiny new toys. So while it’s been easy for me to embrace Google+, shrug off the network’s controversies, and generally have a good experience, something else has happened that hasn’t been quite so easy for me to process.
I’ve started to re-evaluate the meaning of friendship.
You see, friendship always used to be born out of shared experiences in the physical realm. You grew up and played together on the same street, attended school together, or otherwise met and formed lasting bonds over recurring in-person events. When I take a look at my Facebook feed, most of the friends whom I see there meet this definition. We’ve met, broken bread, shared drinks, and have often laughed together over stories from past events.
A Small Circle... Of Trust
But when I take a look at my Friends circle within Google+, I notice something peculiar: most of my Facebook friends aren’t there. It’s not because they haven’t made the jump to Google+, however. No, a large number of them are there… it’s just that they exist in different circles with names such as “Work,” or “High School,” or even the new equivalent of the first circle from Dante’s Inferno: “Acquaintances.”
And my Friends circle? Well frankly, it has very little correlation with the number of hours that I’ve spent IRL with the people who reside there.
To be sure, shared in-person experiences are manifest in my Friends circle. College roommates are there, as are a few grad school classmates and parents whose kids play sports with my children. But they’re in the minority alongside people whom, on average, I’ve met in person fewer than three times apiece (yes, I did the math).
Think about that for a second.
I trust these people with my important thoughts and personal details more than I trust the kid who grew up two houses down from me, the people who knew me when I had gleaming silver braces on my teeth, and even some family members.
To me, this signals that the criteria which constitute friendships are evolving. As geographic ties decrease in importance, the basis for friendships in the digital age now center around two different factors: (1) trust, and (2) shared interest graphs.
While trust has always been a key element of valued relationships, shared digital venues — centered around interests — have been increasing in importance relative to shared physical venues for years. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but Google+ amplifies it by forcing you to think about the people with whom you feel most comfortable sharing.
And yes, I know what you’re thinking. Right about now you’re whispering something along the lines of, “Nice work, Einstein, you’ve uncovered that people enjoy the company of others who share their interests.”
But that’s not it at all.
It’s not that I’m disinterested in receiving status updates via social networks from people with whom I’ve spent a lot of time. Instead, what’s happening is that I feel more comfortable sharing “the real me” with people whom I’ve hardly — and in some cases, never — met.
Not in my Friends circle
Why? Simply put, the alignment of interest graphs — the “the expansion and contraction of social networks around common interests and events,” according to Brian Solis — is increasingly the basis for trust in our lives. The more time we spend with people in social networking hangouts conversing over public and personal topics, the more we value the relationships within those communities. For me, shared passions such as social media, fantasy football, and technology form a background for more engaging, more trusting dialogues with others, even when our conversations stray from those topics and into personal matters.
The fact that my personal discussions now occur more often with people whose photos I recognize from Twitter, Facebook and Google+ — but have never seen in yearbooks or picture frames — is of little consequence.
I have Google+ to thank for this latest bout of introspection, and I bet I’m not alone in feeling this way.
In fact, I bet that if you take a good look at the one Google+ circle that you really trust above all others (whatever you call it), and compare it to your Facebook feed, then you might find the same thing.
Take a look, and let me know what you think.
