March Madness is a time-honored tradition for college basketball fans in the US, and this weekend is “Selection Sunday.” That means it’s bracket time.
Millions of fans will be getting online to find brackets to fill out and chart their visions for the path to the NCAA championship. Many will likely turn to Facebook, and they’re in luck because developers like CBSSports.com, Watercooler and Citizen Sports have created March Madness apps where users can create brackets, participate in discussions and pools, and find news, scores and videos from the tournament.
“These top sports developers have found success in creating trusted applications for March Madness and building communities that bring the social aspect of college basketball online,” a representative for Facebook tells Murdok.
The 2009 Bracket Challenge app from Citizen Sports has already generated interest from over 230,000 monthly active users. Watercooler’s 09 Bracket Challenge app already has more than 415,000 monthly active users who have created over 100,000 pools and sent over 1.1 million challenge invitations. The CBSSports.com Brackets app has over 130,000 users are currently interacting with the app, ranking teams from favorite to most despised and posting thoughts on the “Smack Talk Wall.”
“Starting in 2006, we brought the tradition to Facebook by using the first brackets application to organize and share all of our picks online,” says Melissa Luu-Van on the Facebook Blog. “Since then, the number of ways to connect over the 63-game NCAA basketball tournament have only increased.”
Given the incredible popularity of Facebook, along with the added attention it is getting this week from rolling out its new features, you can probably count on a lot of Facebook time being spent this Sunday by people all across the US. In related news, it doesn’t look like the economy is dampening NCAA office pools.
