Geek Leading Fantasy Football League During Playoff Push

At the end of August, I told you how I manage to take what should be an enjoyable, brainless, activity like fantasy football, and still 'nerd it up', reverting to laptops, Excel spreadsheets and Web-based databases. (See: The Even Geekier Approach to Fantasy Football) Now more than four full months later, the NFL regular season has ended, as have most fantasy football teams, who wrap things up before the playoffs begin. But not the one I'm in. The top four teams in the 12-team league completely start over, redrafting from the playoff rosters, and battle it out in a prolonged contest that lasts through the Super Bowl.

I thought I'd catch you up.

As I mentioned back in August, one of the benefits of not having a favorite team is that I can put my biases aside and pick who I think will do the best, not just who I wanted to do the best. Luckily for me, this led to a quick start, where I scored more than 100 points in 3 of the first 4 games, and at one point had a 10-2 record, having won seven straight head to head contests.

Despite a late-season fade that saw me finish 11-5 overall, a full game behind the league's first-place finisher, I won the division, and was among four teams that got to participate in the playoffs, which started yesterday.

Unlike Yahoo! Sports, ESPN and other online leagues, which use the regular seasons' last weeks as the playoffs, we completely reset and start from zero - adding a new level of strategy, where which teams you pick are just as important as the players. Picking players from teams that get eliminated in the first week means you lose them from your roster, and there are no pickups - so choose wisely...

As a two time winner, having collected trophies in the 2001-02 season and 2005-06 season, I took on this week's draft hoping my experience would have an advantage. (See: Three And Out Takes Fantasy Football Title from February of 2006) But, after taking two full years off from the game, there was always concern I'd had my head so deep in playing tech blogger that I'd forgotten how to do it right. (See: An NFL Season Without Real Fantasy Football?)

Luckily, so far, things look good.

I filled my 13-person roster with three Carolina Panthers, including the red-hot De'Angelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart, three Arizona Cardinals, including the veteran Kurt Warner at QB, and a handful of players with huge upside, including the San Diego Chargers' Darren Sproles, who could score points for me as a rusher, receiver and kick returner, the Eagles' Brian Westbrook and the Falcons' Michael Turner at running back. (See: Roster with Scoring History)

Saturday and Sunday's games played out practically as I would have liked. San Diego staved off the favored Indianapolis Colts. The Cardinals beat out Atlanta. And the Eagles defeated the Vikings at home in Minnesota. As our league playoffs progress, this means I've lost a bare minimum of players after the first weekend, as my opponents lost some key talent. And as most sports fans know, Darren Sproles had an amazing game, garnering 42 points (in fantasy land). Warner contributed 18, Westbrook 17, and Larry Fitzgerald a solid 16. This helped propel my team to 129 points in the first weekend, with none of the other three teams breaking 100. (See: Standings)

My previous years in the league tell me that an early lead is good, but not enough. In order for me to sustain the momentum, I'll have to see my players stay active. If next week is a disaster, and is as bad as this weekend was good, it could be over in a matter of hours. But the start is good.

If you played fantasy football this year, how did you do? How did your league handle the playoffs?

See: Kiss of Death League Reloaded Playoffs

Twitter's OAuth Target Slipping Amid Increased Security Pressures

Over the weekend, more than one exploit, sent by way of Twitter's Direct Message feature, has made it around the Web. As Twitter's growth has continued, the microblogging service looks to be a new domain for scammers and spammers, previously contained to traditional e-mail. And as the shenanigans gain in momentum, so too does the call for Twitter to implement OAuth, the open protocol that allows for secure API authorization, which has become popular among many Web tools in use today. But Twitter employees' postings in the service's development group, and their own notifications on the site, show a shifting roadmap, while they also try to divert criticsm by separating the need for OAuth from the weekend's incidents.


An example of one Twitter phishing attempt.
Twitter's success has seen a groundswell of applications being developed that require users to enter their user name and password on third party sites. Given Twitter's lack of OAuth support, Twitter users have grown used to posting their data whenever they are asked, and in the rare case a site has been found to malicious, it forces them to once again change their passwords to protect their account.

The OAuth Web site spells out the reason behind the project's development, saying: "If you're storing protected data on your users' behalf, they shouldn't be spreading their passwords around the web to get access to it."

The weekend's activity featured a mock Twitter login page, where users were prompted to enter their credentials. (See: CNet: Twitter phishing scam may be spreading) While this specific attack would not have been solved by OAuth, but instead by users simply paying attention to where they were logging in, you can see Twitter's attitude on the current process.

Alex Payne, a lead developer of Twitter told one user on Saturday: "Right now, you can't see which apps are using your requests. You can change your password, though.", and later told another user, "We're trying to discourage against clicking on the link." Pretty basic stuff.

When pressed on whether Twitter was going to implement OAuth, and reduce users' growing too comfortable with posting their passwords everywhere, Alex said, "OAuth isn't a panacea against phishing and other web security issues. We're still going to support it," and following on, echoed the OAuth site by saying, "A main benefit is that OAuth limits the scope of activities that can be done with a user's credentials," while also linking to a post from April of 2008 that showed how phishing scams could not be stopped by OAuth. See: Phishing Fools?

So, we get that the phishing problem won't get solved through adding OAuth, but we do see more and more applications getting your password. As the New Year came in, Twply managed to get many passwords, and then was sold the same day. (See: Scobleizer: Twitter spam, effective or idiotic?)

Alex mentioned Twitter is going to support OAuth. But when?

In the Twitter Development Talk forum, you can see the target continues to move.

Alex, on November 24th of last year, wrote: "We're currently waiting on our User Experience team to put the final touches on a BETA release of our OAuth support. It's going to have bugs, to be sure, but we should have it out there soon. "

On November 26th, after being pressed for a date, he said, "As I don't know the entire schedule of our UX team, I can't. I would say less than a month and closer to a week by far, but please don't hold me to that."

On December 8th, Alex gave more specific timing: "It won't be available for testing this week, but should be available before the end of the month. I'd definitely encourage you not to launch on it, though, as it will be a beta."

Now more than a month from the first comment, amidst more developer pressure, Alex says the next major version of the API will be OAuth-only, but deflects some of the criticism by pointing fingers at other services that have not yet jumped on the OAuth bandwagon.

This afternoon, January 4th, Alex said:

"Of course, once we offer OAuth, it would be nice to see the same community pressure that's been applied to us put towards companies like Amazon. The Amazon.com iPhone app collects my username and password, and that account is actually tied to my credit card information. Where are the blog posts about their anti-patterns?"

Now, there's no question I'm no security expert. Don't forget that on November 12th, I once wrote, Twitterank Can Have My Password, No Questions Asked, and Alex looks to be feeling the strain of other non-experts, like me, pushing the team to get more robust. He commented on Twitter this evening, "It doesn't help that web folks generally have next to zero security/crypto education," a bucket I'm no doubt in.

The groundswell of demand on Twitter to improve its security measures, to get to OAuth as quickly as possible has no doubt reached a crescendo in the wake of this week's exploits - both those solvable by the project and those that are merely phishing scams. But it looks like Twitter developers' confidence has been shaken by so many promises being out there, and the deadline continuing to move.

Are We Too Connected to Social Media?

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)


Do you ever feel like you are too wired? Do you find yourself using a password manager to keep up with passwords to the dozens of social media and web sites to which you have subscribed? Dan Keldsen posted a very interesting piece that really got me thinking on linking all of these various social media types together to form multi-dimensional and very personal points-of-presence (POP’s) for every individual.

Dan writes:

They are a meta-meta-aggregator in the sense that they are aggregating (collecting) information from multiple sources, and that their underlying data sources can also be aggregating information from multiple sources (such as ZoomInfo). This extends the reach and richness of the information that they are able to pull back on behalf of users of their system, in a similar fashion to the functionality of federated search or universal search in more traditional enterprise search.

In an ideal world, or at least with the smarter salespeople and marketers, such information will help to weed out who the appropriate people are to engage in more targeted discussions, and to engage in informed conversations of the "2.0 age" rather than in continuing to hammer out cold-calls and blanket, un-personalized (or badly personalized) mass-marketing.

Though Dan's article is referring specifically to a product called SalesView by InsideView (a CRM mash-up that aggregates social media information about potential clients), I can't help but notice we seem to be drowning in a sea of social media outlets. For instance, Twitter is interesting and a social medium to which many people subscribe. However, it begs a question in the context of its underlying purpose, “What is the end-game for this type of social experiment?”

[Dan contends] social networking is not purely about person-to-person connections, or in providing a virtual watercooler (or virtual voyeur perhaps) view into your "friends" (peers, co-workers, etc.) but also for the ability of participants IN the network to use the data within that network to become smarter in the ways that they interact with the people in that network.

Bluntly put, information about people abounds through many different channels, all of which were never before captured outside of family photo albums or epitaphs. Now that all of this information exists in a connected world, it is becoming a very relevant question to ask, “What can be done with all of this information about you? Is your information usable or abusable in its new formats?”

All of this latent "social information" is buried in the heap of individual silos both inside and outside of the control of any one [corporation], even deeper ... than "normal" electronic information is.

InsideView has a few ideas, according to Dan, albeit a bit Minority Report-ish. However, let's assume we all have the best intentions of using this information to the benefit of mankind; it makes me wonder whether this medium will connect us in ways never before dreamed or allow us to conduct plastic surgery at-will to our public persona? And just who decides someone, or some organization, should be granted access to a given network of POP's?
For now, everyone is having fun, and rightly so. By all accounts, this is a golden age of connectedness not seen in centuries past. Even as we marvel at our own magnificence, I can't help but step back, take a breath and ask if we are all just a little too connected?

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Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To learn more about Ken, visit his about page. You may also find Ken on FriendFeed, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Armchair Quarterbacking and Why I Talk to Companies Using the Blog

Whether it's due to the fact it's another 'slow news' weekend, or due to the fact I was more bare in my recommendations for how FriendFeed, a service I am constantly using and like a lot, could improve in yesterday's post than I usually am, there was quite a bit of feedback from around the Web, which both echoed the comments I had made, and questioned the reason for my making them in the first place. Interestingly enough to me, despite a full year or so of being called a FriendFeed addict, apologist, or what have you for my consistent favoring of the service, several people tried to construe my direct suggestions as somehow interpreting the site would fail - which I don't believe I ever came close to saying. But what they missed was I have a history of offering suggestions to companies, both new and established. Sometimes, I can do this 1-1 with the developers, but often I use the blog.

A person's blog can be whatever they want it to be. It can be your brand. It can be a megaphone that allows you to speak to many at once. It can be a personal diary. I've chosen to make mine about services I find interesting, and to a lesser extent, about me. The posts I make are about services I encounter and usually care about. I tell you how I feel or what I saw, and make it personal. And when I give feedback about companies, it comes from my thoughts and usually is spat out top to bottom as I was thinking about it, with little organization - just raw.

And given the blog's relative obscurity in 2007 and 2006, it's likely few saw my original set of feedback I offered FriendFeed more than a year ago - and how it mirrored other occasions where I've done similar posts for other services.

For example:

• February 18, 2007:How to Make LinkedIn Even Better
• March 3, 2007: 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader
• March 12, 2007: 10 More Suggestions for LinkedIn
• August 27, 2007: What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?
• December 30, 2007: 10 Suggestions for FriendFeed
  
• March 9, 2008: 10 Suggestions for Google Reader, One Year Later
• August 27, 2008: 10 Suggestions To Improve FriendFeed's Beta

And I haven't always been nice. See: Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite. Not Even Close. and After Monkeying Around, I'm Not Going Bananas for Chi.mp, for example.

On August 29th of 2007, I wrote that you should Use Your Blog To Talk To Companies, and I've been doing that. I do it because as consumers we are often the silent party in the buyer and seller relationship. The company controls the product, the message, the delivery method, and tells you how you should use it. As a consumer, you can buy it, and you can be satisfied, or not. I tend to believe that as a consumer, I may have some ideas that the company either didn't think about, or didn't think were as important as other items. By using the blog, I can make my opinion clear, and also act as a sounding board for other people who might have shared the same opinions, but didn't know where to start, or thought they were alone.

Just look at some of the comments I saw on Twitter following yesterday's post:

@elizabethsosnow: "I am one of the stale accounts."
@spinko: "Louis Gray talks about friendfeed and how it's not intuitive for new users like myself. Amen, I still don't get FF."
@maryhodder: "just read the Louis Gray article myself.. agree. FF is overwrought and makes me feel like i'm drowning."
@jayrosen_nyu: '"Simply put, people aren't getting it." Louis Gray on FriendFeed's barriers to intuitive use. I'm one of those people.'

Sarah Lacy said she is one of those people I described in yesterday's post who pipes their data in and gets a lot of followers, but doesn't participate. For whatever reason, FriendFeed hasn't won her over, and she says the company didn't try to engage her inactive account (one of the suggestions I had yesterday).

I mention these not to pile on, but to show the post started a discussion of people who weren't thinking about the issue, and might possibly have extended the visibility of the issue to others who thought everything was "just fine". As Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr said, FriendFeed Isn’t Dying, and I never said it was.

What I chose to do with yesterday's post, and the many before it was to speak up where the above examples had chosen to be silent. Mark Trapp called it 'Armchair Entrepreneuring' and said I could collect more flies with honey than vinegar, adding, "Offering feedback is one thing: but the sheer hubris of tech bloggers that they know how to run a company better than the ones actually running it is entirely different." But I wasn't aiming for hubris, nor was I aiming for linkbait, as my cranky Canadian friend, Steven Hodson, suggested I might be. What I was doing was sharing my candid thoughts about a service I really like and one I want to get better and better.

I use the blog because it is public. It is searchable and others with similar issues can find it. I use the blog to talk to companies because very often, they listen. Many of the suggestions I've given to LinkedIn, to Google Reader, to FriendFeed and others have happened. I'm not naive enough to think it was because I recommended they would, but it tells me I occasionally am on the right track.

I will armchair quarterback and keep talking to companies, as Dave Winer says, to help them, not to hurt them, and to help others. And sometimes, companies really do value the feedback. That's part of why I'm working with ReadBurner, SocialToo and engaging with others informally. It's about pushing people who make products to make them even better than they are now, and potentially, being part of that process.