This is awesome. Great idea and really well executed. I'll fill my bracket out tomorrow.<p>WRT getting people to come back, I'd leverage your stats. Some ideas:<p>* Tweet during the tournament. e.g., "63% of our users correctly predicted Georgetown over Tenn."<p>* Tweet / show on the site the percentages of people who bet each way on each game, and the percentage still left in the running<p>* Show the user their potential chance of winning the $5k over the course of the tournament, as people are eliminated. Like watching poker on TV.<p>* Show a leaderboard and tweet the current leaders. Have many categories, e.g., "top picker this round", "top overall", "worst overall"<p>* Tweet / blog interesting stats you see in the dataset. For example, which team do people think is most underranked? Overranked? What team do people think is the absolute worst? Absolute best?<p>* What does your aggregate Final Four look like? Aggregate Sweet 16? Track the "score" of the aggregated bracket over the course of the tournament.<p>Edited to add:<p>ESPN does something really clever with Fantasy Sports you could mimic. During the football season they'll run ads for a "late league", for people who missed the draft deadline. If you offered a "late pool" (i.e., one that starts in the round of 32 or 16) I bet you'd be the only one.
Just revoked Twitbet access to my account after it autosent a Tweet for me without any [edit: enough] warning or pause for approval. Please don't do that.
I built this service in about a week as a full time student. The $5k prize is guaranteed if 5,000 people fill out the 1st page of the survey.<p>I'd greatly appreciate any feedback on the product as a whole and if you think a Twitter-based system could do well as a generic sports betting/following platform.<p>Thanks!
The bracket is well done.<p>So you're trying to buy exposure, what are you going to do with it? And whatever you do, you need to do it fast. I'd go ahead and assume that unless you have something else to show people during the later part of the tournament when they check how they're doing, everyone will forget about you.
1. Where will you get the $5k? Your own pocket? Are you charging people $1? But it says free ...<p>2. Are sure you aren't going to get into legal trouble? IANAL, and I know nothing at all about the relevant laws, but still ...<p>3. Contest Rules and Terms don't mention the required tweet anywhere.
Cool idea, except the tweet sent out only includes a link to <a href="http://twitbet.com/" rel="nofollow">http://twitbet.com/</a>. Instead, you should link to my personal bracket that I just filled out, so that my friends can see how badly I am at picking winners in college basketball.