Kilg.us – Fantasy Stat Tracker …Tracker

Now in year two, Kilg.us has seen significant growth. Since the start of the baseball season, membership has increased about 10-fold. Our community grew 6% just in the last day. With so much interest materializing, I was inspired to encourage further growth. To do so, I’ve added an “invite your friends” feature to the Dashboard and Find Owners pages. You can invite up to 5 friends at a time. All you have to do is enter their email address (preferably their name, too, but it isn’t required) and click “Send Invitations.”

There is some client-side validation to check for email address formats. I also included a quick check on the back-end to ensure you aren’t inviting someone who is already a Kilg.us user (based on email address). Right now the system doesn’t report back if you invite a current user–it just neglects to send them an email.

The invitation email that is sent includes a brief description of Kilg.us, an offer to sign up and join your (ie, the person sending the invitation) industry, and a list of links for more Kilg.us information. Last, but not least, there is a disclaimer at the bottom indicating who requested that the email be sent. This includes your name (if you’ve defined it in your Account Information) and email address.

So, go forth, invite your friends, and build your industries!

A bunch of little improvements today that will  hopefully make life a lot easier on Kilg.us. First–and most importantly–I think I have finally fixed how Kilg.us is gathering Win, Loss, Save, and Hold data. Since adding holds a few weeks back and tweaking how those categories are gathered, the numbers had been very inconsistent. Sometimes they would seem correct, sometimes empty, and sometimes it looked like season totals instead of daily ones. After digging around in the method for almost an hour, I finally I identified a missing character that was causing the SQL insert to fail in one of the three options for saving data. That’s been fixed and all the numbers are looking more accurate now. Hopefully that will keep up.

On the Dashboard, I’ve removed the alert message describing the new Dashboard. In its place there is now a “What’s This?” link in the My Industry column of the page. It links off to the blog pulling up all articles tagged with “social networking”. Hopefully that collection of articles will amply explain what Industries are.

Also on the Dashboard I added a link to determine which of your Industry teams you want to view. The idea is that you may have been given permission by others in your Industry to view teams you might not care about (for example, if you join the Major League Baseball Teams Industry, you’ll have 30 teams to view). Rather than having an enormous list of teams, you can now restrict the teams that display to those that are of most interest. Of course, at any time you can go back in and change those preferences.

On a related note, the team selection drop-down in the top-right navigation now includes sections for both My Teams and My Industry. Like on the Dashboard, only Industry teams that you have selected to view will display in the drop-down. You can now use the drop-down to jump straight to any team you can view with one click.

Each User in Kilg.us can create an Industry. An Industry is a collection of other Owners whose teams the User can potentially view and who can potentially view the User’s teams. Industry members cannot edit or change one another’s teams in any way–they can only view them. All team management functionality remains the sole rhealm of the team’s Owner (the User who originally created the team).

To build an Industry, a User must search for other Owners and add them to his/her Industry. Before an Owner is added to another User’s Industry, the Owner must approve the addition.

Once Owners are associated through one-another’s Industries, the Owners can select which of their teams they wish to share with the other Owner. These viewing rights can be changed at any time by the User that owns the team.

All management of a User’s Industry is performed via the Dashboard: searching for and adding Owners, accessing other Owners teams, and changing viewing rights for teams.

Once an Owner has been added to your Industry, you can select which of your teams that Owner can view. This is done using the Team Permissions page.

Access the Team Permissions page for an Owner by clicking on that Owner’s name from your Dashboard in the Industry section. This will bring you to a page that lists all the teams you own, along with “Hide” and “View” radio buttons for each team. To make a team viewable by the industry member, select the View radio button for that team.

Once you have made your selections, click the “Assign View Permissions” button. This will save your team viewing assignments to Kilg.us and reload the page. After the page reloads, you should still see your assignments properly selected.

The next time your industry friend logs-in to Kilg.us, they’ll see your teams (the ones you selected for them to view) on their dashboard.

[This note was posted to all Users' dashboards on 4/5/2009. I've included it here for archival purposes.]

Welcome to the new Kilg.us Dashboard! If you’ve been using more than 1 team in Kilg.us, the Dashboard is a familiar concept to you. If not, this is a whole new concept.

The purpose of the Dashboard is to provide quick, one-click access to all the functionality of Kilg.us. On the left side of the screen you will see the “My Teams” section. This provides links to all the teams you own within Kilg.us. Simply click on the link for a team to access that team’s stats page.

The right column now contains the “My Industry” section. This consists of 4 main sections: 1) Notifications of Industry requests (think of them like Facebook “friend requests”), 2) link to all the teams shared with you through your industry, 3) a list of your industry friends, and 4) a form to find new industry members.

The core of the new Industry functionality is in place, but it will be undergoing lots of development and improvement in the coming weeks. Please check out the Tracker blog to learn more about how the Industry features [will] work and for the status of new functionality. As always, feedback is appreciated either through blog comments or email!

Kilg.us is now the world’s first social stat tracker. This afternoon I finished up the basic functionality to allow the creation of “Industries” within Kilg.us. The underlying concept is to allow Users to track the stats of their friends’ and competitors’ teams.

The solution isn’t particularly elegant right now. I’ll be continuing to improve the interface and interactions in the coming weeks. Look for a future post to walk through how Industries work. For now, hop into your Account Info, add your personal details (name, hometown, cell phone), and opt into the public sharing so you and other Owners can start to build your Industry!