You Can Take the Girl Out of San Antonio, but…
Editor’s note: Read this, then download the Fanvana app. You won’t regret it.
June 20, 2013, was the lowest point for me as a sports fan. It was the day the San Antonio Spurs lost the NBA Finals despite having complete control of the series with under 30 seconds to go in Game 6. Going in to work on June 21 was one of the loneliest experiences that I have had. Think about a championship hangover without the championship and a lot of crying. It is pretty awful. I do not recommend it.
Growing up in the Bay Area and following the Spurs was never easy to do and this was not new to me. While at Stanford, I found it very difficult to discover and interact with other Spurs fans nearby and I had no idea where to watch Spurs games. As a sports fan, I had never quite felt the same level of pride and satisfaction as when I was at Oracle Arena for Game 3 of the first round playoff series against the Dallas Mavericks in 2007. (Despite my love for the Spurs, the Warriors are my home team and I support them whenever they are not playing the Spurs.) It was the Warriors’ first playoff game after a 13 year drought and the energy in the building was just electrifying. The Mavericks were just blown out of Oakland. It was a kind of energy that just did not translate across borders and it was something I assumed I could never have as a Spurs fan living outside of San Antonio.
But there was just something about not having a community of fans to mourn with about the devastating Finals loss that pushed me over the edge. At the time, I was a data scientist at Facebook and was exposed to some really interesting data about socially engaged fans that made me realize that I was not alone. Based on publicly available data, I discovered that roughly half of all socially engaged sports fans in the United States live out of state. In fact, I coined a term to describe fans like me — we are “long-tail fans.”
In the summer of 2014, I set out to solve my personal pain points as a long-tail fan, in hopes that it would improve the fan experience for other fans like me. For the last year, I have been obsessed with this cause. Today, I am pleased to announce that Fanvana has publicly launched a personalized, real-time social discovery app for sports fans. We are currently focusing on the NBA to get that experience just right and will roll in other major leagues as the sports calendar progresses.
Click on image to enlarge.
Fanvana is fan + nirvana. I hope that you will all enjoy the app and its emphasis on the fan voice. It does not matter how many followers you have or how many other big NBA fans you know. We have made sure that the right fans will discover your posts in the right context to help you start meaningful discussions about topics you care about. Our focus on real-time and locations helps surface the most interesting content for you and provides you a one-stop shop for everything you need in order to follow the NBA Playoffs in style.
- Swetha Prabhakar
Another damn editor’s note (<— this guy): You can download the app from iTunes here, and you should do it. For what it’s worth, I was given the opportunity to test out the app before its launch … man, it’s very cool. And I’m not going to tout a product if I think it sucks, I promise. The interface is great, and the options you have at your disposal are kind of perfect in today’s “I’m gonna tweet and read and watch and chat and share” NBA-viewing experience. If you’re a fan of the league — and especially if you’re a fan of a team that plays in a city far, far away from where you — you’ll really enjoy this. Pretty confident in that.
Also, you should follow Swetha Prabhakar on Twitter. She’s a hell of a lot smarter than I am, she’s also a very good writer, and she’s a Spurs fan on top of it, working hard to develop a way for you — the other Spurs fans (and also fans of other teams) — to enjoy the game-watching experience more. Support her. Do it.
