A few weeks ago I decided to quit my job and do something on my own. An idea, to let cricket crazy fans do commentary about anything and everything related to cricket, has been lingering on in my head for very long. I have been thinking on and off about this idea for about an year now. It is finally launched and the URL is cricketr. As such the would cricketr is a typo for cricketer but the "r" actually signifies that cricketr is a web2.0 site.
The idea itself is not very unique. It is basically a twitter clone for cricket. There are, however, a few very subtle but a few important differences.
1. Unlike twitter, it does cater only one domain and hence domain ontology can be used to make sense of a commentary. For instance, if I type "Sachin just hit a massive six", it can deduce that sachin is a player who belongs to Mumbai Indians(IPL context). Not only that, if a match is going on, or has just finished/about to start it will also identify the match and tag this commentary to that match tag. This way it is possible to generate crowdsourced commentary which is extremely fast. On a demo run today I found this to be about 2 minutes faster than cricinfo score and commentary updates and about 1 minute faster than cricbuzz's score and commentary updates.
2. Personal interaction is important but not the goal. Idea is to let users talk about cricket and derive knowledge out of it.
It is still in a very fluid state(it is basically a product of 4 days of almost 24hr marathon hacking sessions) and a lot of things need to be decided upon. Some big features planned pretty soon. Hope people will like it and do a lot of commentary on it :)
Fingers crossed!
