Every year, we come across dozens of new applications looking to capitalize on March Madness, when millions of basketball fans across the country try to predict the outcome of the heated 65-team NCAA tournament. One new app that’s launching today is called tweetBracket, which gives users an extremely easy way to share their picks with their Twitter followers. The application, while basic, is notable because it’s a preview of the technology being built by a Y Combinator startup called 140bets.
Using tweetBracket is simple. You sign in to Twitter using oAuth, and are presented with a random matchup from today’s games. Click the team you think will win, optionally tweet your choice to your followers, and repeat. The game keeps track of your picks throughout the tournament, and prizes are being awarded to the people with the most correct predictions for each round.
tweetBracket is built off of the platform that 140bets is currently developing, which makes it easy to build apps around a binary interface (the company has also put together a similar app for American Idol fans called Tweet Idol). CEO Jason Wilk says that the platform is still early in development, but that eventually it will be used for more real-time interaction (for example, you might keep it open as you watch a game and predict whether or not a player is going to make the free throw he’s about to take).
Link goes to generic Godaddy site.
YAY! for GoDaddy Parked Domains!
-_-
The link goes to a Godaddy parked page with ‘milf’ links for me.
Lots of traffic for Godaddy now :D
The site’s still parked, or may be the DNS changes haven’t propogated everywhere!
140bets.com/tweetbracket
Good grief. Making a Twitter app that does anything will put you on TechCrunch I guess. I think I will make a Twitter app that lists all the Twitter apps that are on TechCrunch so they will write about my Twitter app. Sounds like an infinite loop ;)
Added the app to Twitdom – The Twitter Apps Directory.
Great use of a Twitter/FB powered platform. Businesses like this, although simple, can make a ton of money with rebranding. I worked for a guy that leveraged an iPhone framework for 100′s of different binary-type apps and makes seven figures sitting in his house.
I can see this being popular for office pools on March Madness as well. Interested in seeing how they incorporate real-time game-based events into the application…
I built Twitpickem.com. Create a bracket, dudes. You can still enter.
Sick app. Perhaps the technology can be applied to the financial markets (ie. stocks, commodities, fx, etc.).
awesome. who’s going to take it all?
AT&T started a branded twitter app page like this since last year…www.titletweets.com…..and it’s actually pretty awesome bc it lets you trash talk to the opposing team fans in real time!
Let’s you see the buzz ratings and trending for each team and matchup in real time, and it doesnt just pull in peoples comments from the twitterverse- it also feeds in peoples comments via text message through screens they placed in sports bars nationwide. check it out online or on your phone:
http://titletweets.com/ http://titletweets.com/mobile
Jason and Paras are a great team. They’re very creative and they get things done. Wait until you see what else they have in development.
I’ve been lucky to get to know them at Y Combinator.