race result communities: AthLinks
There was a thread on the top-secret Microsoft triathlete mailing list last week about a few websites that help you track your race results and/or do some research about people that you'll be racing against.
The first site mentioned was www.athlinks.com. The sheer number of race results in the AthLinks DB is quite impressive. The site's top bar tells me that they have data from 40k races - 16MM results across 9MM racers. Some quick math - that's an average fo 4k finishers per race meaning that they must track a lot of running road races. Triathlons and bike races don't have that many competitors! 16k people have signed up for a free account which lets you have a facebook-ish profile/wall page.
The site's most interesting feature is called Rivals - they figure out who you've raced against 3 or more times. For a junkie like me that can lead to hundreds of rivals! (Right now I have 857 listed. Oy!). I have it on good authority that they're about to upgrade the Rivals feature to include more cinfigurability - that wil be worth checking out.
Other features include
* Friends - you can tag another user as a friend
* Search Athletes - type in a name and see a bunch of race results
* Search Races - find results from the 40k races in their DB
The result-to-person matching is imperfect but the site makes it easy to claim other results as your own. I saw five of myelf in the search results - one with my home state of Washington, three in states where I've raced (California & Hawaii) and one in Texas, where I used to live - but in claiming one of those duplicate-selves I was shown a list of other "results that might be me" to claim.
Some of the results are imperfect as well. Most of my races are triathlons and their result-reading software sometimes has a hard time figuring out which columns are swim, bike and run. I see Swim-T1-Bike and Total-Swim-T1 as two of my 16 triathlons that the site knows about.
The site has a few social networking features, some of which are rathe runqiue and well thought-out while others just seem to be thrown in:
* Race Reports let you include a bunch of structured data - most of the "report" consists of selections from radio button groups or drop-down lists: race distance, how you slept the night before, what training phase you're in... I wonder if they plan to let users and/or race directors mine this data...
* Athlete Journal: blogging
* Playlists: song_artist pairs that don't appear to be connected to any other features on the site
* What Did You Do Today (WDYDT): training log with slightly-structured data entry
* Add Article Link & Upload a YouTube Video Clip: these features tie into the site's goal of aggregating your online sport-focused experiences
* Add Gear Item: describe/rate an item that you just bought, complete with pictures!
The site also provides a calendar of upcoming races.
I will review some of the others sites later in the week - www.triresults.com and www.sportstats.ca. Let me know if you've heard of others.