

TweetBracket (YC W10): An Easy Way To Share Your March Madness Picks - parasctr
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/18/tweetbracket-march-madness-twitter/

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jackowayed
A little bit of a late launch (even 24h earlier would have been better), but
you're not doing a real bracket, so it'll work.

That said, since they don't actually share their whole bracket, the name
doesn't quite fit. Also:

* You should show the seedings of the teams so people can make a better decision. Seed is a lot more meaningful than record.

* You need to be much clearer about how the contests work

* The pictures of the HDTV and of the final four logo look grainy and bad.

* Your about page says you're based in "Norther California"

EDIT: You should really not tweet for people unless they explicitly tell you
they want to. I wasn't paying attention to the little checkbox under the
picking, so I sent 2 tweets and thens saw 10 min later that I had done so.
Also, your default tweet wordings are pretty annoying.

EDIT2: Alright, this sucks. I decided to do some more picks, so I went back to
the site. I had to log back in which was kind of annoying. Then, it started me
with games I had already picked. Then I got some new ones, but pretty soon I
was on games that had already started, and it gave me an error when I tried to
pick them because of that. And it didn't remember that I had unchecked the
"tweet this" box, so I sent some more inadvertent tweets.

I think having people pick the following day's games may work better.

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jasonwilk
Thanks for the advice!

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fseek
I had to laugh when read "dead simple" . Someone complained about it on HN a
few weeks ago and it is true. Tech Crunch abuss too much of this term..

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moron4hire
hehe, I only clicked on the comments for this thread because I wanted to see
if someone would comment on "dead simple" again.

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NEPatriot
First time I can recall seeing "Dead Simple" is on Posterous. I think we're
just used to everything being overly complicated so that anything that's
simple is by definition "dead simple". Simple by itself is naked and
unsophisticated. Dead simple on the other hand is special.

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antidaily
Also of note: <http://twitpickem.com> and <http://twitbet.com> from HN
posters.

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khangtoh
@140bets, if you are reading this, you need to state rules and regulations
CLEARLY to host contests like these in the US. just wanted to highlight that
so the founders don't get caught in a bad situation.

Google answer about online contests/sweepstakes
<http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/716341.html>

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byrneseyeview
Why are they using the $abbreviation syntax? Stocktwits uses that all the
time. This must really tick them off: <http://stocktwits.com/symbol/LEH>

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robrenaud
I'd really love to see something that gives recommendations for bets in a
local pool based on your region.

Assume that geographically concentrated bettors will have similar biases
because there is a strong preference of fans to bet for their team, even if
its the underdog. By being contrarian, even if you aren't picking the best
overall bracket, you can maximize your chance of winning a particular pool.

If you could mine the data provided by TweetBracket, you could even get a good
estimate of local biases to make good contrarian brackets.

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pclark
was this the YC startup that had special access to twitter?

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jackowayed
The RFS made it sound like any YC company could have special access to
Twitter, but I don't see any reason why Tweet Bracket would. I guess they
might use it for other parts of the platform in the future, though.

