One of my co-workers (designers) coaches one of his daughter’s soccer teams during the springtime and it keeps him pretty busy. A couple weeks ago when the ‘big rain’ hit central Iowa, he was scrambling to get in contact with the kids’ parents to discuss practice and schedule makeup games.
Today I stumbled upon (yet not using stumble upon) a niche social network called Team Snap. It’s a social network for managing sports teams online.
It comes with your standard ‘dashboard’ with features like
Manage game and event schedules
Communicate with your teammates
See who can attend which games
Share photos and player info
It’s in open beta for free right now if anyone finds this interesting.
The alternative reason I found the need to publish this post is because I was very curious to see who would pay for this type of niche service. I could see something like this; a central hub to communicate to my players and their parents, very valuable. But under different circumstances, what other niche social networks would you pay for? What wouldn’t you pay for? If you could have any social network built for you on command, what would it be?
I’ve discussed the idea of finding, keeping, motivating, and retaining young technology knowledge workers before. The best advice I can give without going into a long post is look to Google. Why does Google get the best and the brightest? It’s the perks…
“The work day has just begun yet some Google Inc. employees are already taking a break to get a haircut in the Internet leader’s parking lot. Rather than lamenting the distraction, Google encourages it.
Every day three refitted Winnebago mobile homes roll into famed Silicon Valley high-tech companies such as Yahoo Inc., eBay Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Genentech Inc..
The service by Onsite Haircuts illustrates Silicon Valley’s distinctive work culture and is welcomed as firms seek to motivate workers and give them a sense of community. Ultimately, experts say, such an environment boosts productivity.”
And yes – it is a simple, old fashioned start page. At first I was intrigued by the advertisement’s blatancy but that was soon over shadowed by the concept – that being taking steps backwards for purposes of simplification and reflection.
The principles behind OfficialHomePage.org are the same that turned Google into the behemoth internet powerhouse that we see today.
Hopefully we’ll accomplish the same simple old fashioned appeal whilst building innovative products. We’ll see – soon.
What attitude? Blaming the internet for failure, again. Guess what – you’ve had ample opportunity to adapt and you haven’t listened. All you had to do was divert eyeballs through a different medium.
Walter Hussman Jr writes in a WSJ column that free is a “disastrous business plan.” He discusses that young, computer-saavy consumers like myself won’t buy a paper because I can find ‘all the news that’s fit to print’ online. (that blurb is on the front of every NYT – don’t tell me that I don’t read newspapers)
Yeah, you are right. Your problem is that you should have figured out this was going to be the case ten years ago. How much more obvious could it have been?
There’s been a resurgance of the talks of newspapers closing shop due to the loss of advertising (Google’s fault) and classifieds (Craigslist’s fault) revenue. Bill Gates is correct (in my opinion) in saying newspapers will be online in five years. The question I have is how many newspapers will start working towards that now – rather than when it is too late? If it isn’t already…
UPDATE: YouTube had to remove the video due to NBC Copywright Violations… (lame). Anyway, I knew I could find it elswhere so here it is thanks to Clipster..
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