FantasyTwits.com Launches Just In Time for the 2009 Fantasy Baseball Season
FantasyTwits.com is a brand new site that interfaces with Twitter to categorize and display Tweets from fantasy experts. For those of you not familiar with Twitter, it’s time to come out from under your rock. Twitter is the Google of Microblogging. You’ll find everything from people discussing fantasy baseball trades to people who just like to post when they are going to the bathroom. Each “Tweet” can have a max of 140 characters, hence the term Microblogging.
FantasyTwits is currently “following” fourteen experts. That means they found fourteen guys who like to talk about fantasy baseball on Twitter. Most of them represent major sites or blogs. The experts know each other, probably because of the status they’ve attained on Twitter. They often “Tweet at each other,” which is having a conversation through Twitter microblogs. Today @crookedpitch and @fakebaseball are having an interesting conversation on Adam Dunn vs. Chris Davis. You could follow this conversation without FantasyTwits.com if you followed both of these guys on Twitter, but that is not nearly as convenient as what FantasyTwits offers. Basically, they do the filtering for you.
They also have a tagging system to track which players are being talked about the most. This is the same idea used on the popular StockTwits.com. You can tag players in your twitter posts by using # followed by the first two letters in his team’s abbreviation, then followed by the first two letters in his first and last name. It seems complicated, but it really isn’t. For example, you can tag Mewelde Moore in your Tweets by typing #pimemo. Peyton Manning would be #inpema. Their hope is that people discussing fantasy sports will start using the tagging system. It would be very cool if this system does get adopted by all the experts, but that may be a longshot.
Even if no one tags their Tweets in real time the tagging system can still be implemented on the FantasyTwits site. On each Tweet there is a “Tag this Tweet” button that anyone logged in can use to tag Tweets to players. This system will be maintained by the sites members. So, if you see a post untagged, do your good deed for the day and tag it to a player.
Twitter is growing quickly. Sites like FantasyTwits are also starting to spring up. Everybody and their brother may be finding something they like on Twitter soon. Check the site out to see how the online phenom that is Twitter can help out your fantasy game.