Who's Playing News and Updates

Form is fleeting, class is forever (Stuart Grimshaw)

sheffield, england - november 19th, 2008

We've rolled out some important changes tonight over at http://www.whos-playing.com, and this email is a quick heads up to let you know all about them.

We've received some good feedback from you, but it's been via email which means that only we get to see it. To make feedback more of a conversation between you all we've added a link to UserVoice, a 3rd party site that lets you suggest the features you'd like to see, then everyone gets to vote on the best ones. You can also report bugs, or get support this way too by using the form on the right hand side of the dialog that loads.

The other thing we've done is to improve the ratings, you wont see any difference, but under the hood we've made them more precise, which means that the more games a player is rated for, the more accurate their rating is. It's our way of implementing the saying "Form is fleeting, but class is forever"

Hopefully leaving feedback is easier now, so we'd love to hear from you.

Who's Playing offers some help. (Stuart Grimshaw)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SHEFFIELD, England - November 10th, 2008 - Following our push for beta users on sites like Facebook & Stumbleupon we've had several new organisers join the site, but very little feedback. That doesn't mean we havn't learned anything from our new members, quite the opposite!

For example we've noticed that all the new organisers have created their accounts, filled in their team details & entered their full name, but none have sent any invites to other players to join their team, this could easily be down to a bug, but our own testing shows this functionality works. So it's more likely that it isn't obvious enough that organisers are supposed to complete this task next.

So today we rolled out some extra help for organisers, if you havn't invited any players to join your team, you will be prompted on your dashboard to send some invites, and we'll even give you the link to click on right there!

Sending invites is easy, on your team's page there is a box where you can enter a list of email address, seperated by a , or a space. Each email address you enter will be sent an invite to join the team. You can also add "ringers" to your squad by entering their nickname. Ringers are people who play infrequently, or don't have an email address and let the organiser manually assign a skill level and add them to matches.

www.whos-playing.com caught fielding ringers. (Stuart Grimshaw)

SHEFFIELD,England - October 7, 2008 - www.whos-playing.com today released 2 new features for their 5-a-side football site. These new features offer organisers the ability to add players to their teams that don't have email addresses, and give them greater control over the players playing in a match.

Organisers can now add players to their teams without an email address, these "ringers" are given an skill level just like normal players. Organisers can add individual players for a single game, or they can build a whole team of ringers and manage exactly which players are available, without any action from the players themselves.

www.whos-playing.com is currently in beta, and actively seeking feedback from it's users. It's free to sign up, and all beta testers will receive 3 months free usage of the site when it is officially launched.

Press release (Stuart Grimshaw)

For Immediate Release

Who's Playing (http://www.whos-playing.com) is a new service for people who organise after work, social 5-a-side football games. It aims to take the slog out of emailing a whole bunch of people, collating the responses and finally, picking two sides that are equal, perhaps the hardest part of making the game enjoyable for everyone.

Organisers invite their players to join the site and as part of the short sign up process, players must give themselves a rating, which is used to pick balanced sides. After each game the other players get to vote on how well they think the other players performed, and this is used to keep the rating accurate and up to date.

To organize a game, the team owner simply chooses a date, time and location and his players are sent an email with all the details and a link to click if they want to play.

Once the game has enough people signed up to play, an organiser can let Who's Playing select 2 evenly balanced sides. Once he's happy with the sides he can mail them to everyone who's playing.

Who's Playing is currently undergoing open beta testing, and match organisers are encouraged to sign up for an account so their feedback can incorporated into the site before development is completed.

Who's Playing is free at the moment, once completed the cost will be just £10 a month (or just 25p a week extra per player if you have 5 players per side, less if you play larger games), new sign ups that help test the site will be given 3 months free when the site is officially launched.

Contact Stuart Grimshaw for more information

Welcome to Who's Playing (Stuart Grimshaw)

I'm really excited, Who's Playing is looking really polished, that's not to say it's perfect, but it's come on leaps and bounds in the last week, and it's getting closer to launch with every update.

People keep asking "When will it launch?", well in effect it's launched right now, it's fully functional, you can use it to organise your games, but expect a few rough edges (let me know on the Google Group if you find anything)

The cost of Who's Playing will be £10 a month, which works out at 25p extra per player, per game if you have 5 a side games, it's even less if you have bigger teams!

Anyone who signs up for an account before the official launch will automatically get 3 months free use of Who's Playing as a thank you for helping us test.

New Design, New Features (Stuart Grimshaw)

Apart from the new design for Who's Playing, I've been working through the things that the beta testers have been finding.

You can now retreive a forgotten password, or more accuratly, have a new one sent to you in the case that you forget your password

I've also set up a Google Group for the site, where you can post any problems you find, or discuss any new features you think would be useful for Who's Playing. You can subscribe to the group here