If you are a fan of InfiniteHoops, we would love it if you helped our site get a little attention by nominating InfiniteHoops.com for "Best Boot-strapped Startup" in the Seattle 2.0 Awards.

We really appreciate your support.  Thanks very much!

http://www.seattle20.com/awards/nominate.aspx

This week our pick-up sports community reached an awesome little milestone.  We signed up our 10,000th player on InfiniteHoops.com, InfiniteSoccer.com and the other sites.  While we are still small and no comparison to the Facebooks and MySpaces of the net, it blows my mind that ten thousand people have discovered the sites and find them useful, when originally I built InfiniteHoops for myself and my basketball friends.  

It's incredible to think that more than half of the ten thousand have signed up in the last year.  There are a couple reasons behind that in my opinion.

1) People continue to turn to web to find more and more of what they want in the physical world and finding people to shoot or kick a ball around with is no different.

2) Groups on our sites are starting to fill up, so there’s an increasing chance that if you are looking for a game in an area you can find a few people already in a group wanting to get out and play too.  As of today there are more than 2500 populated groups on the site, which are attracting new members all the time.  More and more groups have reached enough players to organize themselves into regular recurring games.

One might wonder if adding third-party sign-in mechanisms like Facebook Connect, MySpaceID and Sign In with Twitter has contributed to an increase in the rate of sign-up on the sites.  Looking at our numbers, I can tell you that after we released Facebook Connect in April, our conversion rate went up by approximately 1% to about 8%.  It didn't hurt, but it wasn't huge.  On a monthly basis, registrations by third-party services account for about 15% of our new player registrations.  Facebook Connect makes up 80% of those.


What's new on the sites?

The most recent feature is real-time.  I love it.  I can't stop talking about how cool it is to have all blocks on the site be live and real-time updatable.  It's awesome to sit on your game page and watch your In/Out/Undecided roster fill out without any page refresh or polling timeouts.  So cool.  

I also want to make the site useful to players when they are not sitting and looking at a full-screen browser.  Players are now able to respond to group comment notifications within an email client whether it's on the desktop, iPhone or Blackberry, and the reply will be posted to the site and sent to the other group members.  There's no "do_not_reply@infinitehoops.com" address for us.  I can't tell you how many people reply to those, including myself!  


What's next for the sites?

Look for more features for people that are away from a desktop computer in the coming year.  I can't announce anything yet or predict what the next thing will be, but I am sure you know I love the web and I love mobile.  In fact, I have more items on the TODO list than I can count, and so many of these have come from you guys, which is awesome.  Thanks for taking the time to send me feature requests.  Keep them coming.

Anyhow, I can’t believe we reached 10K.  Thanks so much for checking out the site.  Tell your friends about us, everybody!

Cheers,
Tosh

PS, so who was the 10,000th player?  A basketballer from Stoneham, MA.

Tonight I am releasing a new version of InfiniteSoccer that reflects a significant change in the way developers are building new sites of the real-time web.

What is the real-time web?

The real-time web is all about information delivered to you as it becomes available.  For InfiniteSoccer users, it means every block on the site is real-time enabled.  When you look at your game roster, you will see your teammates mark themselves as in, out or undecided as they do it.  Your comments and updates blocks will always be up to date.  It means you don't have to refresh to see the latest stuff.  You don't have to wait for something to poll to get new data.  It's all live.

I hope the change is useful to you.  I think you'll see more real-time features all over the web as time goes by.  As always, if you see a bug on our site or have feature suggestions, feel free to send me a message and let me know.

Cheers,
Tosh

We've just added the ability to sign in with your Twitter account to InfiniteSoccer.  If you are a big Twitter user and would like to avoid remembering a new password, feel free to click the "Sign in with Twitter" link and get right in.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Tosh Meston

Hey everybody,
Just a quick update. InfiniteHoops now supports Facebook Connect and MySpaceID as login methods. This means you no longer have to remember your InfiniteHoops password, you can just click the Facebook Connect or MySpaceID button and get right in.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Cheers, Tosh Meston

"InfiniteHoops is a unique site that lets you find others in your area who might want to start a pickup basketball game. Users input where they will be playing a game and when, and others who want to play can join the game. It's a great way to connect with people around town when the tournament makes you want to play some hoops."

-- Don Reisinger, CNET Blog Network author

CNET mentioned InfiniteHoops in a March Madness inspired post this evening.  How cool is that?  Check out the article everybody.

InfiniteSoccer would like to thank CoastToCoastTickets for their support of our pick-up sports social network.

Coast To Coast Tickets is your connection to great tickets, nice people and a fantastic buying experience.  Looking for soccer tickets or other sports tickets?  Coast To Coast Tickets does the searching for you, and they make it possible for you to buy tickets to an event, even at the last minute.

Coast To Coast Tickets -- Great Tickets from Nice People

Nice.  Our Infinite sports sites have reached four thousand registered players today.  Not bad at all considering we're a home grown shop, self-funded, self-developed...  The last six months or so has been very good for us.  The player registrations and page views are at all time high.  We've even added a site for finding and scheduling pick-up hockey games -- InfiniteHockey.com.

We've also had some great press from a number of sites including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Toronto's GlobeAndMail.com and the technology blogosphere's ReadWriteWeb.com and more.  Check out our press page!

So who was player number four thousand?  A soccer baller from Santa Cruz, CA.  Invite your friends everybody.  Let's go 5000!

"In this post we look at another mainstream basketball site, but this time a small niche site created by someone with a passion for the sport - InfiniteHoops.com.  InfiniteHoops.com has a very simple purpose: to enable people to find and schedule pick-up games of basketball."

-- Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb

InfiniteHoops was featured in a post on ReadWriteWeb today, which I think is fantastic.  ReadWriteWeb is a blog that covers web technology news, reviews and analysis.  Thanks for the great post, Richard!

"Bring your game to your social graph."

Tonight we're turning on the beta of our Facebook application.  If you use Facebook, you can publish your InfiniteSoccer game status to your news and mini-feeds so your friends know when you can play and you can recruit them to your game.  Your Facebook profile will show your next game details.

All of this is experimental so let us know your feedback.  I'd love to hear what you like and don't like.

What a day.  First I wake up to seeing InfiniteHoops mentioned in Mashable.com, and now the Seattle PI venture reporter, John Cook, has included InfiniteHoops in a post on his Venture Blog on Seattle sports startups.  Have a read.

Quote: Tosh Meston, who runs the InfiniteHoops site, where basketball players can find local pick up games ... created InfiniteHoops because he and his friends simply wanted an easy way to know who would be showing up for games. The site now has about 3,000 members and 600 groups.

The social networking news site Mashable.com has given our site InfiniteHoops a mention.  Check it out.

Quote:  InfiniteHoops.com - If all this basketball talk this time of year gives you an urge to go out and play some yourself, InfiniteHoops can help you set up a pick-up game in your area quickly.

Today we launch InfiniteHockey.com, a new social sports network designed to connect people to play the sport of hockey.  If you have a regular game and are looking for players, schedule it with us so players can find it.

The release of InfiniteHockey coincides with some new features in the software that powers each of our sports websites.  


ICalendar Subscriptions

For each group, you can now subscribe to the iCal feed of the upcoming games scheduled by our system.  When looking at a group page, you will see a "Subscribe Calendar" link in the left side menu and calendar icon in the top right corner of the group details block.  If you use a calendaring application like Microsoft Outlook or Apple iCal and you click on this link, you will be subscribed to the game calendar.  Updates will be automatically pulled into your calendaring app so you'll always be up to date.

Social Bookmarking

If you use a social bookmarking service like Delicious, Digg, Faves etc., and you like one of our news items, you can click the "Fave It!" or "Bookmark" buttons and save them to your social bookmarking service.

Display Preferences

By default, we show your next two upcoming games on the main page, but if you play more frequently and want to see additional games, you change it under Preferences / Display Preferences.

http://InfiniteHockey.com

InfiniteHoops was mentioned on Seattlest.com as one of their best technology picks of 2007.  Awesome!

Quote: Seattlest emailed a bunch of local tech professionals and asked them for the best of the Seattle tech scene in 2007. They responded and we threw all their suggestions in a list, looked it over, and scrapped 90% of them and then made up a new list off the top of our heads.
...
8. Infinite Hoops
If there's a theme to the rest of the list it's that the best technology out of Seattle this year really shines when it's facilitating real-world contact. InfiniteHoops.com helps you find pick-up games in your area.

InfiniteHoops is mentioned in an article on sports social networking sites.  This is our first press!