PLATFORM: iPhone
PRICE: Free
When Rachel Sterne, the city’s chief digital officer, talks about the potential that software developers have to create innovative new services for New Yorkers, she often mentions Sportaneous. Indeed, the application is a great idea: people who want to play pickup sports can create a game and invite others in their area to participate, or join a game that someone else has created. The app won the popular choice prize, as well as second prize over all, at the NYC Big Apps 2.0 contest in March.
The only problem is that the app is not always useful. I tried it repeatedly this summer in hopes of finding a basketball game in Greenwich Village or Astoria, Queens, but never set foot on a court. Internet services like this rely on something called the network effect, meaning that they work well only after they have become popular. With only about 100 people in its system, Sportaneous was stuck at zero.
Changing tack, the app’s founders set out at the start of the current academic year to build a critical mass of users in the area around Columbia University. So far, 900 people have become active users, said Omar Haroun, one of the app’s developers. Sportaneous has been used to arrange group runs, Ultimate Frisbee matches and even a large-scale game of Quidditch, the sport played at Harry Potter’s wizard school.
“If you have everyone in one neighborhood on this, it provides value,” said Mr. Haroun, a graduate student at Columbia. “If you have five people in every neighborhood, it doesn’t really work.”
The app is available in Philadelphia, San Diego and New York, but its creators are focusing their efforts on Upper Manhattan. It offers a list and a map of events that have been proposed in a certain area, with details such as how many people are coming and how competitive the game will be. There are 14 kinds of activities to choose from, and each event has a message board on which participants can discuss important details such as who will bring the ball.
The app also allows users to create private games, posting listings that only invited guests can see — a new feature that turned out to be very important. People are much more likely to use Sportaneous as a way to supplement and expand the social circles they already belong to than they are to compete against people they have never met.
Zach Lane, a Columbia graduate student, had used Sportaneous sparingly in the past, to play basketball, and was turned off by meeting up with people who were not skilled enough to challenge him. “It’s hard to really get into a game that people can enjoy when you don’t control who’s a part of it,” he said.
Now, Mr. Lane plays several times a week in private games arranged by the Columbia Ballers’ Group. The group has more than 60 members, all invited by friends of the original members.
Still, this does not quite address the problem that Sportaneous originally set out to solve: how to connect people with nothing in common but a desire to play and a few free hours on a Thursday afternoon. But Mr. Haroun hopes that the recent success gives the app’s developers a starting point for more ambitious experiments.
“We’re learning lessons about human nature in general, about how to overcome people’s inertia and sticking with what they know,” he said.
JOSHUA BRUSTEIN
Have a favorite New York City app? Send tips via e-mail to appcity@nytimes.com or via Twitter to @joshuabrustein.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3cf8a67c2b00e62e62d2777db56e53e2
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