The Bulls. Cardinals. MLB. Tim Tebow. Halftime report. Fantasy football. Blackhawks. Illini. And the list goes on and on in the world of sports.
In an era when cyberspace keeps buzzing about the latest draft picks, the newest transfers and all the playoff scores, it can be a bit overwhelming to get through all the chatter.
But thanks to “Spoolios”:http://www.spoolios.com/, an online service launched in November last year, sports fans might get a little more control and a sense of sanity and organization when accessing news, blogs and analyses that seem to be coming from every direction.
For Greg Macagba, sophomore in AHS, it allows him to check in on certain players or teams without having to go through all the sports websites and search engines.
“Usually people have to tune into ESPN on TV or see news headlines on other websites,” Macagba said. “This website gives us the opportunity to focus on the news that we want, whenever we want it.”
The idea behind the site is to search for and categorize sports news from all over the web. It includes all kinds of content, ranging from big national sites to small local newspapers and blogs, and everything in between. After a user has made a list of tags, the site automatically and distinctly categorizes all the articles that describe the teams, sports, players, or writers the article is associated with. Visitors to the site can create their own “spools” and subscribe to the tags that interest them, resulting in a set of personalized news feeds.
Jonas Kaplan, lead developer of Spoolios, thinks it’s particularly useful for people who follow many different sports in many different geographical locations. That’s what makes the site so useful: it brings together all the relevant news and puts them into one place.
“Before Spoolios, there was no single place to go to that gathers news from all of the national and local sources into one place and filters it,” Kaplan said. “I would check espn.com or si.com for a general overview, but then I would go to local sources like the LA Times for more coverage.”
Upon signing up for Spoolios, users can create a list of tags. These could be for leagues, divisions, teams, favorite players or even fantasy sports. One can make multiple spools, or just read everything on one big spool. Users can also click tags to find the latest news about trending topics without adding them to their spools if they don’t regularly follow them.
Getting the site up and running was one of the most difficult things for the developers to do. Trevor Savage, head of marketing, says the team spent over a year working on functionality and how best to acquire all the articles and appropriately feed them into the correct spool. Spoolios uses RSS feeds that go into a tagging system program to determine which articles are relevant to which spools.
“Appropriately tagging the articles was the largest technical challenge we faced,” Kaplan said. “The computer has to understand what it is reading to some extent in order to make difficult decisions, like distinguishing between an article about Washington and one about Washington State. It has to know that when it sees “Fighting Illini” that the story is about UIUC.”
Spoolios also enables users to write and responds to blogs. Making the site feel more like a community than just a source of news, enables users to be more interactive about the sports they are passionate about. Both Savage and Kaplan say the site has a wide range of audiences, from the diehard sports fanatic to the casual sports fan.
“For the hardcore fan, it’s appealing because it helps you feed your appetite for more and more content. For the casual fan, its nice to not have to put effort into finding things related to your casual interest,” Kaplan said.
Ultimately, time will tell how popular the site will get and what new features will be implemented. For students like Macagba, the site is already part of their daily routine.
“I use Spoolios every single day,” Macagba said. “It refreshes itself and gives me up to date reports.”
