Ten Thousand Players!!!

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.