1 min read

The end of some of my sports picks applications

During the Rugby World Cup, I stared an application on Facebook: France 2007 World Cup Picks. It had that stupid name for trade mark reasons. (Another app turned up a few weeks later called Rugby World Cup complete with the real logo, but it didn’t have anything to do with the IRB.) It now called Rugby Picks and is following the Heineken Cup.

At its peak, there were 35,000 users. The peak was about halfway through the competition, and it dropped off significantly by the end. At its peak I thought, wow, this is a good idea, why not do it for some other sporting competitions. So I did. And now there are apps for the Premier League, Champions League, NBA, College Football and NHL. And the A-League and cricket too. Except half of those have next to no users and updating the scores is taking a up a lot of time, for no gain.

I wrote Rugby World Cup app for two reasons: to learn about Facebook applications (pass) and to draw people to Zemobo (fail).

Because of the time involved, I’ve had to make a decision, and I am going to close down the applications that have less than 300 users. So that means goodbye to:

  • A-League Picks
  • College Pigskin Picks
  • Cricket Picks
  • Fútbol Picks
  • What The Puck?
  • Basketball Picks

I’m sorry for the inconvenience. If anyone who reads this is interested in purchasing and maintaining an application (VB.NET/SQL Server code base – you’d get a non-exclusive license to the source code), please send me a message on Facebook (the link’s on the application pages).

These ones are still around:

It’s interesting to note that it’s rugby and football (both big in the UK) that are getting the most users.