March Madness

We have a bit of March Madness at Ringside getting ready to launch tomorrow. But for the rest of the country, it is the NCAA college basketball tournament - and of course CBS Sports big deal with Facebook.

CBS has provided this year's bracket system on Facebook (a Facebook application). Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users (including my 11th grade daughter) have made their choices and anxiously compare themselves to the rest of their friends, or within their high school or across the world. CBS is going to make $25 Million this year from on-line advertising of the tournament, and the Facebook crowd is a big channel for them. It also engenders the type of engagement and virality we have been talking about in this blog.

Come tomorrow when Ringside Networks launches our Beta open source project, folks like CBS will have a common platform that they can build applications like this on. A platform that will enable them to build one application that runs on both Facebook and their web site. A platform that will let users interact across both environments. A platform that enhances the engagement of your existing website users and promotes word of mouth spreading into other social networks.

By the way, I love the "Boss button" on the webcast site - it brings up the following image very quickly...

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