Phanoto Presents: Sports Driven Social Media
If you’ve ever found yourself watching a big game by yourself, then you’ll know it is nowhere near as much fun as when there are other people around to enjoy it with you. Arguments over the game, moaning about players, sharing in the triumphs of your team with like minded fans as they score the winning point, all these things go hand in hand to enhance our natural enjoyment of sports. Which is why Phanoto.com is hoping to provide a platform through which all manner of sports-fans can come together and share their thoughts on the games they love, as they happen.
The site achieves this in two ways.
First it provides game specific message boards for people to talk on during live sporting events. These take the form of traditional posting boards, letting people comment on the action as it actually takes place. With the only (relatively) unique feature being that the boards are only active for the duration of their specific event, after which they got logged into the sites archive.
Second, Phanoto provides a place where fans who are actually at games can share their photos with other fans. To help facilitate this, the site has developed apps for Android, Blackberry and iPhone smartphones, which let users upload pictures directly from their camera phones onto the site. Photos are filed under the event they where taken at, with the option of including them in one of the sites interesting picture categories, such as celeb and me, sexy phans and drunk phans (to name a few).
Phanoto also runs competitions, in which fans have to take a picture of a famous sports player, alter it and include a funny caption. At the moment there don’t appear to be any prizes for the winner, other than knowing they produced the funniest picture, but that may change as the site attracts a larger audience.
Users can vote on the photos in the various categories (not just the competition section), so that popular pictures get displayed higher up in their assigned list.
In a way it’s a very neat site. Unlike most web based social networks, Phanoto isn’t built around building personal relationships with people. Instead it focuses purely on providing a place for sports fans to meet up and have a bit of fun. You can friend people on Phanoto, but there isn’t a lot of point, as members only visit the site to browse pictures and to chat about games when they have no one else around. There is also a complete lack of integration with other social platforms, which is incredibly rare in social sites today. If you really hit it off with someone, you can send private messages and get further contact details from there, but the site really isn’t about making those kind of long lasting connections.
Phanoto’s non-personal focus allows users to meet up and bond in a close yet strangely distant way (similar to how people in a sports bar can bond over a football game, only to never see each other again). This could well be the magic ingredient needed for becoming a successful social platform in this particular market. Plus there are entertaining sports pictures to look at when your bored and surfing the web, everybody loves those right?
It’s going to take a lot of hard work to get Phanoto off the ground, but I can see this site getting a fairly big following if it has the right kind of promotion behind it.
Posted in Social Startups. Tags: sports social networks
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