As usual, we’ve been busy doing what many of you – Sportmeets users – asked us to add or improve and we’ve also implemented another few items from the long-list of features that we want Sportmeets to have when it grows up!

So, let’s look at the new features and improvements:

Static Pages

You can now create your own static pages in the About us section of your group or ladder. Whatever it is that you want the visitors and group members to find out about – the brief history of your club, rules of conduct on the team’s night out (handy for mixed teams), or a few links to interesting websites -  you can now put it on a dedicated page.

‘Mark Yourself OFF’ Option

If you’ve ever been using mailing lists to sign up for a game of football you might find this situation familiar: you’re heading somewhere away for a couple weeks and cannot play in the meantime. So you just keep receiving all these emails about “the game next week” and you have to, for the 11th time, politely excuse yourself that you are away. So we’ve added this nice button on your dashboard which marks you OFF if you cannot play. Use it if you get sick, injured, go on holiday or just need to get away from it all for a while.

Cancelling & Deleting Meets

All types of meets can now be cancelled on the meet homepage (big red X) and everyone that RSVPd ‘yes’ will be notified.

Calendar feeds

We like to see you sporting and we’re making sure you won’t miss out on the action by…forgeting about it. If you use an iCal, Google, Outlook or Yahoo! calendar, you can now have all  your group’s events synced with it. This not only saves you time of adding them manually but also saves you all the beers that you would otherwise had to pay as a penalty for not turning up.

…and finally:

Badges

Some of you might have noticed them already, but for the rest let me explain: Badges are our way of saying “Hey, playing sport is cool. Play more often, improve your game and win matches! Get other people playing too! And be proud about it!” We give badges to motivate people to try new sports. We reward those that do something extra, contribute to the community and help spread the word about Sportmeets because they like the idea.  But to make it a bit more fun, we’ve added some hidden ones, so just keep playing the sports you like and you might come across one!

Well, that’s it for now. We really enjoy reading your feedback so please keep it coming. And keep tuned for some more updates soon!

You’ll probably know that organising sports groups has always been at the heart of Sportmeets. What you might not know yet is that there are Sportmeets groups on every single continent by now (although I’m not sure whether Antarctica counts in or not).  And seeing ‘crowds’ as diverse as university volleyball clubs, workplace ping-pong ladders or Sunday-football-in-the-park groups joining in, we decided that we’ll ditch the crowd terminology and put the right name on each of them instead. So you can now choose the type of group that you’re creating on Sportmeets – we are starting off with clubs, teams, ladders and, well, groups.

This is an important step in shaping Sportmeets to best fulfil the needs of each particular type of sports group. Here, let me give you an example. You don’t really have (or need) a secretary or a treasurer in your Thursday night football kickabout group, right? Likewise, the Chairman of a long-established squash club might frown upon being publicly called a mere Crowd organiser. So, that’s the big news. Keep the feedback coming! Chances are high that  your suggestion might make it to the next post!

Happy sporting!

It’s been a busy and exciting fortnight at the Sportmeets office in Prague for our international team. We’d love to share some cool thing we have been up to recently.

Following our promotion at the two events in Perth and Prague, we’ve been receiving a lot of helpful comments & tips on what you like and what we could improve about Sportmeets. We’ve heard from players, captains, coaches, universities and even national sports associations. Thanks for this, everyone! We love reading your feedback and we are happy to transform it into an even better experience of organising games and sports events for everyone.

Introducing: One-on-one game challenges

This is something we have really tackled and are proud to bring to all players! If you play tennis, squash, badminton or any other sport where it is only about you and your opponent (boxing counts too!), you can now challenge another player  directly and set up the game in no time. Sportmeets will let you know as soon as your would-be opponent has accepted your challenge. So, give challenges a try →

Or, if you are not so much bothered as to who are you going to play against, simply create an open match within your crowd and you’ll be notified when  someone takes up your challenge. In any case, if you want to play, we will make sure there’s nothing to hold you back from getting a game set up! Play with the same people often? — then why not organise a formal sport ladder to find out who is really the best in your club, at work or among friends!

Also stay tuned for our still-secret extension code-name “Project Challenger” as well as recommendations on who to play as we are revamping our sport interest matching algorithm!

Yeah, by the way, sporting is social so don’t keep your games for yourself ! Just imagine the upcoming  FIFA 2010 Football Championships being played behind a closed door! So share your matches on Facebook and Twitter and have your friends show their support by voting on who they think will win! They can do so directly at the meet page or via our Facebook app. You can also gently remind everyone which of the two players they should give their vote for (Hint: tell them to vote for you!). That’s what friends are there for, right?

Well then, there’s a lot going on right now,  so watch this space for further updates on what’s cooking in the Sportmeets kitchen!