TweetBracket (YC W10): An Easy Way To Share Your March Madness Picks | Hacker News Reader

TweetBracket (YC W10): An Easy Way To Share Your March Madness Picks

techcrunch.com

29 pointsparasctr15 comments

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.

Thanks for the advice!

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..

Lately, I've been seeing "having said that, ..." or "that being said, ...", a little much in comments and blog posts. Having said that, I'm trying to avoid it myself.

Just noticed that jackowayed below has a variation of it in his comment.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=intitle:%22dead+simple%22+site...

Generally it goes to YC startups by default.

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

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.

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

@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

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

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.

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

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.

We did not apply from the RFP, and YC did not get us onto Twitter. We had to do our own development work there. And Chad : )

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