Six Thousand Players - Time for an Update

All right.  InfiniteHoops signed up the 6000th player in our little pick-up sports network this week so it is as good a time as any to give a little status update on the site.  

On the techy side, I've been doing mostly search improvements lately.  The search box used to be fairly restrictive in terms of looking up cities, i.e., the search string had to match pretty closely to locations in our database.  Now, it has been improved in two ways.  One is that search looks for games and groups in a geographic radius from the location you type in.  Secondly, the string you type in doesn't have to be city name.  It's nice if it is, but you can also type in zip codes, neighborhoods, park names or other locations.  For example, if you type in: "Denny Park", the geocoder will figure out that this might be a location in Seattle, WA and show you a dropdown list of locations you can pick from.  Early results indicate that people are finding it effective in matching them with groups.  If you're using the search box, let me know what you think.

On the business side, clearly 2009 has been pretty tough so far.  Advertisers are spending less and niche web sites such as ours are definitely aware of the pull back.  Nevertheless, our costs are low and we're in it for the long haul.

InfiniteHoops and the other domains that make up our social sports network - InfiniteSoccer.com, InfiniteSoftball.com, InfiniteFootball.com and InfiniteHockey.com - continue to grow at a steady pace.  2008 visits and page views were up approximately 50% from 2007.  Registration was up nearly 200% over the same period.  We look forward to 2009 being another successful year.

So, who was the 6000th player?  A basketballer from Tacoma, Washington.  Tell your friends about the site everybody!

Thanks,
Tosh Meston
Founder of InfiniteHoops