Playspedia is an online community for creating and sharing animated sports plays and diagrams. This is a project I co-founded with my brother, and launched with the help of a skilled developer and equally talented designer.

The Back Story

Playspedia is actually the second incarnation of an earlier project my brother and I worked on for the UltimateHandbook – a community website for Ultimate Frisbee fanatics.

The original version of our online playmaking tool was developed using Flash – a technology, which at the time, was the best way to deliver animations online. The tool worked great for us and we were able to publish a whole series of online plays to help teach new players advanced concepts of the game.

We started getting requests from other players asking if they could use the same code to create their own plays. Thrilled at this interest, we shipped the code out, but then quickly found out that the barrier to entry to creating a new play using Flash was just too high to see widespread use.

New Technologies and New Trends

We let things linger, but then in the last couple years, a number of technologies and trends have emerged that have made it possible (and worthwhile) to revisit this project, and so we set out to build a new version of the playmaking tool and released it under a new name to reflect a new vision.

Here’s a look at what a finished play looks like (go ahead, this is fully functional you can click on the links!):

Click and Drag

Playspedia was developed from the ground-up to be easy for anyone to use. The baseline skillset we targeted was “if you can click and drag, you can build a play”. We’ve also built this so that you can easily share, distribute, and embed plays in your own website. As participation grows, we’ll be doing more with the Playspedia Twitter account and Playspedia Facebook Page as well.

We’ve started things out with Ultimate because it’s a niche sport we know very well, and building this initial version of the tool is a way to satisfy an itch we already have with trying to give existing Ultimate players the means to easily add their own plays. (But yes, we do have plans to branch out into other sports too )

Building the Playspedia Community

We’ve seen some strong initial adoption of the tool (getting some good indicators from our metrics that there is some stickiness, and we’re also seeing international visits from all around the world). The catch now is to find ways to encourage people to share the plays they’re creating.

As you can imagine, not everyone is willing to share the strategies that give their teams a competitive advantage. But one of the biggest strengths of an online playmaking tool is the ability to share knowledge and learn from one another. So the task I’m tackling now is to devise incentives for members to contribute and share their plays.

At the moment, we’re taking a look at a few models based around game-play and participation economies (think: “Foursquare Badges”). And hopefully pretty soon, we’ll be opening things up a little wider for suggestions from the community.

If you’re an Ultimate player, please give it a shot and let me know what you think! We’re actively working on almost every aspect of this, so any feedback is more than welcome.