The Front Row

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bennybuckeye said...

I wrote a really nice piece on 24/7 ahead of their launch. I thought this would be good.

http://www.benkoo.com/articles/biz-and-tech/ex-rivals-founder-shannon-terry-looking-to-challenge-rivals-scout-and-espn-with-college-recruiting-network-20.html

Nearly two years in, I still think 24/7 holds a lot of promise but I have severe doubts about their technology team and am not fond of the design and in general the product roadmap.

Most of the tech team was poached from Rivals. Maybe that was a bad thing. I've defended them quite a bit of late, but the uptime is now in a place where is is a very far outlier from peer sports and other content networks.

Features and general design aesthetics have been lackluster. I think the platform is still ahead of Scout and Rivals but the difference has been marginal and the uptime issues mitigates any progress there. I still have no idea why Bucknuts never got a basketball schedule and I had to stare at our losing football schedule into March. That's not serving your users and I often hit up 24/7 on twitter about that.

I think a part of the problem is that they are hard to get a hold of when shit hits the fans. No relationship building or damage control and users are left with a bad taste in their mouth. That needs to change. They can't hide behind the individual site editors to relay messages.

Maybe it's me being a smug Silicon Valley asshole, but when a company based out of Tennessee is having technology issues, adding elite engineers in that neck of the woods is not exactly low hanging fruit. Getting people to move to Tennessee also isn't low hanging fruit. If it doesn't work out, you're in Tennessee with a lease and that's not fun.