This makes me proud of my team and the teams I work with at ESPN.com:

Considering the asynchronous nature of the Internet, to have two computers within about a half-second using the TCP-based protocol (we’re not doing what video games do) we use is pretty amazing. This is pretty cool.

Even better (though unfair in this test), is the fact that we’re ahead of TV. We’re probably actually closely in sync with TV, as I’m watching on my Slingbox which adds a few seconds of latency.

Apparently, Keith Olbermann plays Fantasy Baseball at ESPN.com and isn’t too happy with the problems we’ve had this year. While I don’t want to speak out of turn, it’s been a pretty horrible fantasy baseball season so far with ESPN’s new Fantasy Baseball game. The short version, for those of you who aren’t using ESPN.com this year, is that a critical software bug made it past testing. You can read more here if you want the details.

Anyway, Olbermann laid into the fantasy team on the Dan Patrick Show (mp3 here) because he felt his team wasn’t that broken, so he’d rather we left it alone. Unfortunately, the bug wasn’t quite that simple, and we had to reset everything.

Anyway, so if Olbermann wasn’t harsh enough on the radio, on Wednesday night he took the next step of naming John Kosner, who is the SVP that runs ESPN New Media, the third Worst Person in the World. A bit harsh, there, don’t you think, Olbermann?

In defense of John, he’s a good guy and while he puts his name out there to take the blame, he really isn’t at fault here for the problems with Fantasy Baseball. Ultimately, he (and the rest of the Fantasy Team and even the company) takes issues like this seriously. While many companies just hide behind some relatively anonymous name (”Customer Service”), he’s chosen to give a name and, now on Olbermann, a face to show folks we care. So, go easy on Kosner there, Keith.

As for the Fantasy team, they’ve been working literally day-and-night to solve the issues with transactions and are finally getting some sleep tonight. I was there for one of the early all-nighters and they really haven’t gone home to sleep most nights. These are folks that care about the games they build. They wouldn’t have taken the step of reseting the rosters if they thought there was another way around it all.

Anyway, for the folks at ESPN.com, here’s a screen shot of an unfairly maligned Kosner joining two truly deserving World’s Worsts, Bill O’Reilly and Dick Morris:

You can watch the video clip here on Olbermann’s site (click on the Bill O’Reilly World’s Worst Immigration video). I also have the video here on FM, which you can watch by clicking here. The video is a PSP formatted MP4 vid, so it might be a little stretched out on a normal monitor.

(While I do work for ESPN.com, and have worked on fantasy games in the past, I’m speaking here as a private individual.)

We just tried to hold a fantasy baseball auction draft online at FantasyAuctioneer.com with terrible results. Our 8 team, NL-only league had trouble with 2 people joining (25%) and had the site go down twice during the first 30 minutes. While the draft was happening, it was fun, but the whole thing was disappointing because we kept having to pause it to let people get back on or because when the site crashed, not everyone knew it was back up at the same time.

This is definitely a hard problem to solve technically, which is why there are so few auction sites, but it’s amazing to me that none of the majors (ESPN, Yahoo, Sportsline) have rolled out auction draft software yet. I’ve heard rumors at work that our advanced dev. team has an auction draft in the works for next football season, but that would be the first one I know of from the majors.

We’re going to retry our draft later this week on FantasyAuctioneer. If it goes well, I’ll update this review. Otherwise, we’ll be looking elsewhere next year, hopefully at ESPN.com.

Update: Well, at least they care about their customers. We received an apology from the owner of the site, as well as a refund and a free draft both this year and next. Very nice. Last week had more traffic and no issues, so something happened this week. They claim it’s not normal. I’d give them the benefit of the doubt as most people I know like their stuff. I’ll still post an update after Wednesday’s second attempt.

Update 2: I take it back. Aside from a little lagginess in the app, the draft went very well. It’s a lot of fun doing this, though getting together in person is still better. The app has almost all of the right tools and has a few small bugs. None of them get in the way of enjoying the draft. The sound cues are good, too. Overall, I’m happy with the experience there.

I’m always wondering why more companies don’t help bloggers do their thing. It’s in their best interests, after all, because more people talking about your content or products and more people using your services ends up being good business. Of course, I work at such a company and I can actually address this issue directly, if only for one vertical.

So, today marks the first release of a prototype tool for bloggers who blog about sports. This isn’t a finished product yet, and I’m hesitant to get it out because it’s not polished, but you know what? I want the feedback. So, if you’re a blogger, here’s what I have. Give it a try and let me know what you think. If there’s interest, we’ll get a finished product built and

Basically, I have a small app which will pump out scoring alerts for different sports. So far, I have NBA and NFL ready to go. For each app, there are programmed notifications for key events. In the NBA version, I’m just using clock time. Alerts will be queued for games that cross 12 minute, 8 minutes, 4 minute, and end of quarter boundaries. I’ll be improving the logic as I refine the application. The NFL version will queue alerts every time a quarter starts or ends, plus on any scoring event.

Here’s a demo for what they will look like:

The video is fuzzy because of the encoding (it actually looked worse on YouTube). It also is quite small compared to the web page. It looks huge on the video because I had to make the window small to fit it in the Google Video size limits. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on my monitor:

If you are interested in trying it out, all you need to do is add this script tag to your blog, anywhere on the page:

This is a prototype tool and as such may stop working, may break your layout, or may just generally be problematic. I hope not, though. Let me know if you find any bugs. Oh, and even the ID attribute above is important. Please leave the entire tag intact when you add it to your blog or site.

I haven’t tested the NFL one, but will be tomorrow during games. Feel free to change NBA above to NFL tomorrow to see it work. It won’t do anything tonight, since there are no games and also because I’m not running the process to generate the updates.

Currently, you can only have one or the other on your page at a time. This is just a limitation for the prototype. You will be able to choose more configurable alerts in the final product, assuming there’s enough interest to build one. Of course, let me know what features you’d like to see and I’ll see what I can do.

If you aren’t interested in this product, that’s OK. Let me know what tools you’d like to see. I have several I’ve built for use here on FatMixx that I’m cleaning up for release. These include plugins for WordPress to make the task of writing about sports easier. They’re basically versions of the tools we offer our own editors and writers, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t have them, too.

(P.S. I feel like I should say that this isn’t the finest app ever built and unlike many things that ESPN does, it doesn’t quite have that flair and polish. It will, but I want to get this conversation started. As they say, release early, release often. I want to make sure we can get feedback before we build something perfect for us, but useless for you.)

I was working on some tweaks to a small research project here and made this handy little chart of blog posts that link to content at ESPN.com. It’s not a perfect tool, as it only captures links to stories on our major properties, but it gives a rough idea of the size of the sports blog universe as captured by Technorati. The data was captured using their developer API.

As you can see, there was a gap in data processing recently (hence the fact that I’m looking at this). I’m planning on exposing some of this data on the site. I think it’s a curiosity, more than anything else, but I’ve found some good blogs this way.

Sujal, is there a way for users to vote in/see the results of a SportsNation poll? If so, check out the recent “What rivalry would you pay the most to see” question. Regional divisions are obvious, but some fun distinctions happen. New Mexico is the only state for miles that’s most interested in Red Sox-Yankees. Fans in Indiana care more about Michigan-Ohio State than Notre Dame-USC. Fun stuff. Good job, ESPN.

I’m obviously keeping an eye on blogosphere comments about MyESPN (thanks, Technorati!), and Rubel’s comments are among the most interesting so far.

My only comment is that our plan is to keep evolving this product and feedback like this makes us think. Also, sometimes you have to build a simpler product so you can stop, see your mistakes, and fix them. Release early, release often, as they say.

(Note: I’m writing here on my own, not on behalf of ESPN or Disney Internet. I did work on this project, so I’m just excited and want to share that with my friends.)

I’m happy to say that MyESPN.com beta is finally available to the general public. It should be an excellent new application for sports fans to set up all of the teams, sports, and news they want in one place site. Instead of visiting a small handful of sites, you can now add the different parts of ESPN.com along with headlines and news from sites around the Internet to your MyESPN page. One stop and you’ve got all your sports and news from more sites in less time. Hopefully, MyESPN will make it easier for you to keep up with your favorite team, win at fantasy, and keep up with the other sites you love.

Savvy users who have used other similar products will hopefully find MyESPN easy to adapt to. I think that MyESPN brings the best sports content and breaks it out into very consumables pieces. You can see a screenshot of my page below sporting the Eagles theme. Click the image to see it full size.

Here’s a quick explanation of what you see. Each little box is called a module or capsule. You can drag them around, rearrange them, get rid of stuff you don’t like, or minimize sports that are out of season.

The great thing about MyESPN is that the modules are richer than many other sites. The top story module, for example, contains the image and all of the links that appear in the Top Story position on ESPN.com. After all, the photography on ESPN.com is one of our strengths. With MyESPN, you can personalize everything and still get the ESPN experience.

The rest of this post will be about using the site. Continue reading if you’re interested in some tips and hints.

New feature coming at ESPN.com that you will probably want to check out, especially if you’re a sports fan. Be sure to mouse over the red caption bubbles to see detailed explanations of the features of the app.

I’m still at work… by choice. (Sorry honey!)

Nothing to see here, just move along.

There are days where that’s not true, but then there are days like today where things seem like they’re all coming together. I can’t talk about what I’m working on yet, but keep an eye on ESPN.com over the next few weeks. We’re getting close to launching some cool stuff.

(yes, I just needed a test post and couldn’t think of what to write)

The Fantasy Games team at ESPN.com rolled out a pretty cool feature this year that allows users to run mock drafts using the actual draft application used in ESPN’s Fantasy Football game. The link is on the fantasy front page and it’s called “Mock Draft Lobby.”

The Mock Draft Lobby allows you to simulate an entire draft without having to do it with your actual league. After all, you don’t really want to draft with your actual league because you don’t want to give away any secrets. The Mock Draft Lobby allows you to start a mock draft within 10 minutes. You can draft with anywhere from 1 to 12 players, so you don’t even need a full room. The missing players will autopick using ESPN.com’s default player list. Of course, we’ve had pretty decent usage of the application, so many of the drafts during the day are full.

When you’re done the draft, the system even emails you with the result of the draft. Try it with a number of different people and you can get an idea of how people are valuing different positions.

It’s also a nice way to preview ESPN.com’s very slick live draft client. If you’re looking for a place to try out draft strategy, this might be the best way to do it.

Click on the image to see a full size screen grab.

(Note: Standard disclaimer applies)

I saw Charlie Brooker’s Guardian piece, Supposing … I’m too old for MySpace, on both digg and on techmeme so I had to go read it.

As a fellow 30+ geek who doesn’t use MySpace, I feel the need to chime in. Especially since I’m building a social networking site at work. More on that in a minute.

The reason Brooker feels like he’s “a fumbling old colonel struggling to comprehend his nephew’s digital watch” is that he keeps thinking there’s a hook there, something that ought to appeal to him that doesn’t. The underlying implication is that as a good geek, he should see the draw of MySpace.

There are a couple of fundamental mistakes here. The first is that MySpace has something to do with geekdom and, by extension, technology. It has absolutely nothing to do with either. It has to do with the age group of those that use it and where they are in life. The New Yorker (Me Media, 5/15/06 issue) had one of the best explanations. They talked to a sociologist who believes being on MySpace is the modern alternative to hanging out at the mall for kids. Whatever the manifestation, kids and young adults need to see and be seen and to socialize. MySpace is about how younger people socialize and make friends.

For those of us past this stage of life, whatever our age, MySpace isn’t for us. A 30-year-old would probably feel as out-of-place just hanging out at the mall. Not that you can’t go to MySpace, see bands, get tickets, or whatever. You can still go to the mall. You just don’t hang out there.

The way to build a MySpace for older Internet users is to figure out what types of things adults are interested in having aggregated about them. If you have kids, for example, you might take more pictures of the kids than you do of yourself or your spouse. It might be a subtle difference, but it requires a few different features. I think a lot of different sites have a lot of the pieces, but the grown-up’s social networking site will have all of this functionality in one place.

The second misconception is that MySpace is the “be all, end all” for social networking. Because he doesn’t get MySpace, he must not get the whole social networking “thing.” That seems too simplistic. Sure, the core functionality is fairly common. Friendster, Facebook, Flickr, or LinkedIn all provide the same basic functionality. Adding friends, self-expression, and sharing are really all these sites are about. It’s a personal aggregator of things about you, and in that way, it’s pretty simple. It’s not the technology that sets them apart but the features and the product. “What do you share?” and “Why do you share it?” make all the difference. MySpace has done some smart things on that front which is why they’re so popular. Danah Boyd’s essay examines some of this, by the way, and is a great set of guiding principles for those of us building competitors.

I mentioned above that we’re building a social networking platform at ESPN.com. There is a team of folks here at ESPN.com including a number of folks in senior management who get this stuff. We see some things that we know we can do better than anyone else, so in September, we will launch our new social networking platform. Our plan is to bring out the basics then. Over the following months, you’ll see new features roll out that will make the ESPN.com offering even better.

This is one of the major projects my team is working on right now. I can’t really talk about the features in more detail, but here’s the summary of the September feature set from the Ad Age article:

ESPN is hoping to become the MySpace of the sports world. In September, it will unveil as part of ESPN’s Sports Nation property the tools for fans to create profiles, contribute to sports blogs, post opinions and link to favorite articles.

John Zaccario, VP-digital media sales and marketing at ESPN, revealed the plans to advertisers at a pre-NBA Draft party in Chelsea that also featured an appearance by NBA great (and ESPN basketball analyst) Bill Walton. “We want to make the sports fan the center of ESPN’s universe,” Mr. Zaccari said. ESPN will allow users to personalize their home pages and participate in blogs and discussions around favorite teams and sports.

There are some more features, but this is the general idea for the September launch. Even more features will roll out over the following months. I’m really excited to see how people use the site, and it should be fun to see where the fans take us.

I actually think the headline of the Ad Age article is wrong, by the way. The only way my team wants to be “MySpace for fans” is in our overall audience. Can’t complain about having 50-60+ million uniques, after all. Beyond the basics, though, we’re going to be very different and, I believe, a lot better. We’re very aware that people of all ages are sports fans whether they’re in the heavily courted 18-35 demo or not. We’re doing what we can to appeal to sports fans of all ages whether you’re in the MySpace crowd or not.

I don’t think Brooker will have trouble getting ESPN’s offering, especially if he’s a sports fan.

Want a job?

We still have some openings on this team, by the way, and if you get MySpace and you get sports and you’re a web developer either on the front end (DHTML, JS, PHP/JSP/ASP, AJAX, etc.) or the back end (SQL, Java, C#, etc.), send us your resume. The job description I linked to is for a particular position, but you can find the other open technology positions on our jobs web site. ESPN is an awesome place to work if you love sports.

(Note: Standard disclaimer applies. I work for ESPN, but I’m writing here on my own. Nothing has been approved or sanctioned by anyone at ESPN.com or Disney.)

First, really, watch the three videos and see if it works for you.

[ it died and I don't want to fix it... it was an ESPN.com prototype of a embeddable video player similar to YouTube or Yahoo video ]

Now, imagine if we were able to offer bloggers and other users the ability to syndicate these videos and publish them on your blog. Would that be interesting for you?

What you're looking at is a prototype application that allows ESPN Motion video to be shared. The player isn't all that interesting. Instead, the interesting piece is the tool and application that allows you to build out a custom player to suit your site and your preferences. Whether you want a single screen, single clip experience or you want to build a la carte playlists for your readers, the app can do that.

There's no plan to launch something like this yet. It's simply one of many prototypes floating around the ESPN.com Technology development labs. One of the practical reasons something like this would be difficult to launch is that we don't have the rights to redistribute all of the content we show on ESPN Motion, ESPN360 or Mobile ESPN. I suspect that we'd have a pretty good chance of getting all the ESPN original content out there, but then there's the question of advertisers and branding. For example, advertisers want to advertise with ESPN, not necessarily with Joe's House of Porn out there on the Internet. Just some of the challenges to rolling out a syndication model that I never really thought about until I started working here at ESPN.com.

Feel free to leave any thoughts, opinions, or comments on this video idea below.