InfiniteHoops was mentioned on the website "Netted: By the Webbys", the people behind the Webby awards.

"Finally, if you’d rather play than watch, try Infinite Hoops, a social networking site that helps you find pick up games. Their coverage is national, and they offer detailed information about the games they cover, so you’ll know whether you’re out of your league or not."

Read on.

"A sold-out crowd of more than 20,000 Cleveland Cavaliers fans set the Guinness World Record for the "largest gathering of people wearing fleece blankets" at the Cavs SnuggieTM Night presented by KeyBank at Quicken Loans Arena."

I would bet anything this was LeBron's idea.  Read on.

If you are a fan of InfiniteHoops, we would love it if you helped our site get a little attention by nominating InfiniteHoops.com for "Best Boot-strapped Startup" in the Seattle 2.0 Awards.

We really appreciate your support.  Thanks very much!

http://www.seattle20.com/awards/nominate.aspx

Quote: Davidson, the Pistons’ owner for nearly a year, confirmed Wednesday night that she was thinking about selling the franchise that won three NBA championships for her late husband.

The Detroit Free Press is reporting that the Pistons' owner Karen Davidson is looking into the possibility of selling the NBA franchise.  Perhaps it is too much to hope for, that an owner would appear from the Seattle area, and relocate the Pistons to the Northwest.  Nevertheless, here's one Seattle NBA fan who dares to dream.  Steve Ballmer, are you a dreamer?

Mashable is reporting that good old Facebook is testing out comment replies via email, a feature which InfiniteHoops has had for at least six weeks!  Oh Facebook, so late to the party...  ;)

"Finally, all of those e-mail notifications you get from Facebook might become useful, as it appears that the social network is testing functionality that lets you reply to status updates (and conversations you’re involved with via others’ updates) via e-mail."

Joking aside, it's a good feature.  I use it a lot on InfiniteHoops and probably will on FB too.

"According to a source close to the negotiations, the 76ers offered Iverson a non-guaranteed contract for this season.
...
The deal is on the table; only he has the answer."

All right, first off -- "only he has the answer" -- who wrote that?

Second, awesome!  It is way to really for Iverson to retire.  The fans want to see A.I. do his thing for a few more years.  He's still got it.  Sign, man, sign!

This week our pick-up sports community reached an awesome little milestone.  We signed up our 10,000th player on InfiniteHoops.com, InfiniteSoccer.com and the other sites.  While we are still small and no comparison to the Facebooks and MySpaces of the net, it blows my mind that ten thousand people have discovered the sites and find them useful, when originally I built InfiniteHoops for myself and my basketball friends.  

It's incredible to think that more than half of the ten thousand have signed up in the last year.  There are a couple reasons behind that in my opinion.

1) People continue to turn to web to find more and more of what they want in the physical world and finding people to shoot or kick a ball around with is no different.

2) Groups on our sites are starting to fill up, so there’s an increasing chance that if you are looking for a game in an area you can find a few people already in a group wanting to get out and play too.  As of today there are more than 2500 populated groups on the site, which are attracting new members all the time.  More and more groups have reached enough players to organize themselves into regular recurring games.

One might wonder if adding third-party sign-in mechanisms like Facebook Connect, MySpaceID and Sign In with Twitter has contributed to an increase in the rate of sign-up on the sites.  Looking at our numbers, I can tell you that after we released Facebook Connect in April, our conversion rate went up by approximately 1% to about 8%.  It didn't hurt, but it wasn't huge.  On a monthly basis, registrations by third-party services account for about 15% of our new player registrations.  Facebook Connect makes up 80% of those.


What's new on the sites?

The most recent feature is real-time.  I love it.  I can't stop talking about how cool it is to have all blocks on the site be live and real-time updatable.  It's awesome to sit on your game page and watch your In/Out/Undecided roster fill out without any page refresh or polling timeouts.  So cool.  

I also want to make the site useful to players when they are not sitting and looking at a full-screen browser.  Players are now able to respond to group comment notifications within an email client whether it's on the desktop, iPhone or Blackberry, and the reply will be posted to the site and sent to the other group members.  There's no "do_not_reply@infinitehoops.com" address for us.  I can't tell you how many people reply to those, including myself!  


What's next for the sites?

Look for more features for people that are away from a desktop computer in the coming year.  I can't announce anything yet or predict what the next thing will be, but I am sure you know I love the web and I love mobile.  In fact, I have more items on the TODO list than I can count, and so many of these have come from you guys, which is awesome.  Thanks for taking the time to send me feature requests.  Keep them coming.

Anyhow, I can’t believe we reached 10K.  Thanks so much for checking out the site.  Tell your friends about us, everybody!

Cheers,
Tosh

PS, so who was the 10,000th player?  A basketballer from Stoneham, MA.

Here is a link to D. Wade's big dunk on Anderson Varejao in last night's Cleveland-Miami game.  Impressive.

Tonight I am releasing a new version of InfiniteHoops that reflects a significant change in the way developers are building new sites of the real-time web.

What is the real-time web?

The real-time web is all about information delivered to you as it becomes available.  For InfiniteHoops users, it means every block on the site is real-time enabled.  When you look at your game roster, you will see your teammates mark themselves as in, out or undecided as they do it.  Your comments and updates blocks will always be up to date.  It means you don't have to refresh to see the latest stuff.  You don't have to wait for something to poll to get new data.  It's all live.

I hope the change is useful to you.  I think you'll see more real-time features all over the web as time goes by.  As always, if you see a bug on our site or have feature suggestions, feel free to send me a message and let me know.

Cheers,
Tosh

There is a new version of the site tonight that now lets you reply to comments and messages directly in email without launching a browser and visiting the site.  

This means when you receive a notification email from InfiniteHoops, telling you that one of your friends has sent you a feeble attempt at trash-talk, you can just hit Reply and tell him to kiss his mom at the bus-stop because you'll be taking him to school -- all without leaving email.

This is something I have personally wanted for a long time.  One thing to note is that the email address you reply with must match the one you registered with on InfiniteHoops.  If your email system uses a mail forward or an email sub-domain, it may not work for you.  In the future, I'll probably add the ability to have more than one email address associated with your account, but today they need to match exactly.

Nike has released an iPhone app called NIKEiD.  The app allows you to customize the colors of Nike clothes and shoes, embroider you baller name on them, save them to a "locker", share them on Facebook, and of course order them.  You can also browse through shoes that other people have customized and even shake your iPhone to choose random colors.  Pretty nicely done all in all.  

Click through to MobileCrunch.com for more details.

Interesting.  The Deseret News is reporting the former Utah Jazz center Greg Ostertag, 36, is attempting an NBA comeback.  Ostertag who last played in the league three years ago has reportedly recently worked out with the Portland Trailblazers.  Read on.

We just released an update to our ad system which lets advertisers reach people in specific geographical locations.  If your an advertiser, you choose the location, we geo-code it to a lat-long and display it on all game, group and search result pages near that spot.  

Perhaps you are ticket seller.  With geo-targeted ads, you can display your ad for Knicks tickets on pages for games, groups and search results in or around the NYC area.

Maybe you run a basketball league.  With geo-targeting, you can display an ad for your league to basketball players in your area.

Contact us for our current rates today.

MensHealth.com has mentioned InfiniteHoops in its "Best Workout Spots" piece.

Quote: Test your skills at these top street ball spots or find a local game at infinitehoops.com.

Have a read.

Quote: Battling the G.I. Joes requires cunning, tenacity, and the proper footwear. Fortunately, Nike is offering a trio of sneakers that let you declare your allegiance to Cobra while providing excellent traction and arch support.

Nike is putting out some G.I. Joe themed basketball shoes, more specifically Cobra themed shoes, because Cobra does rule.  I am || close to trading in my LeBrons for the Destros.  The Storm Shadows look nice too.  The sneaks will retail at $159.99.