Haven’t posted to this blog for a long time already. Today I’ve modified  logging settings of the http://www.freebookie.org to decrease the overhead that is put on the server. IMHO changed had some positive effect on freebookie performance. It should work somehow faster now.

In the end performance problems are “that” kind of problems we are glad (almost) to. We are quite glad to see that our service is used by other people, for example if you check the list of users and sort them by the date (in asscending order by double clicking on the “Joined” column) then you will see that more and more people are registering (last user was Equador):

According to Google Analytics we have at least 10 unique users every day. It’s definitely not allot but taking into account that we spend 0 (zero) efforts to any kind of advertisement it’s quite allot (thanks to our honored adminstrator and bookie Legolaz).

BTW we are looking for new bookmakers for the freeebookie. We would like to add some more categories to our events, for example socker or tennis, or even chess . So in case you think you can post one or couple events via our user friendly UI and play on them for free you are welcome. Just drop us an email on info [at] freebookie.org, we would be glad to hear from you.

If you are one of our users and the event you place bet on is canceled, you will find a bet named “Canceled” in your bet slip. You might wounder why your bet slip contains a bet you never placed. The reason is simple. In order to refund the money we replaced the originally placed bet by an artificial bet signaling that the event is canceled. The odds of the bet are set to 1.0, so you get back exactly the same amount of money you placed. In case of a “Multiple bet slip” you get your money back only if all the other bets in the same bet slip are successful or canceled. In the picture below you can see an example of a bet slip containing a canceled event.

Enjoy FreeBookie

A further noteworthy improvement is the pie chart which shows the distribution of the placed bets on the outcome of events. In a recent post we described these charts. Now the labels of the chart contain not only the percentage but the number of bets on the particular outcome. In the image below you can see that 6 bets were made on the win of Joe Calzaghe, zero bets on a Draw and 2 bets on Mikkel Kessler. This way we want to avoid anonymity and to provide the awareness in our community.

The last feature we want to introduce this week is the introduction of user friendly URLs. In the past several pages like EventDetails page were referenced by ugly URLs like http://www.freebookie.org/app?page=EventDetails&service=external&sp=l19. Now the URL looks like http://www.freebookie.org/event/19. In this case 19 is the identifier of the Event Eddie Chambers vs Calvin Brock. In order to navigate to another event, just replace 19 by another number.

For the people who don’t know what it is – it’s a social networking application similar to LinkedIn, Xing, Myspaces, etc. Main advantage of facebook that this social network enable very simple integration of 3rd party applications in it, therefore using their Java wrappers for REST API we were able to integrate very fast and simple.

From now on, every facebook user (from estimated 49 million) are able to launch facebook application called … facebookie and they would automagically have a freebookie account created based on the information transferred from facebook. They all can place bets and see the bet statistics without any registration/authentication burden.

Main drawback and the biggest advantage of the facebook API is that user’s e-mail is not given to the freebookie therefore users may quite safely transfer authentication information between two sites.

This is the very first version of integration that is only working as single-sign-on for facebook users, we will extend the integration further by adding following features:

• User’s bets will be published in user’s feed
• When bet will complete user will be informed via facebook message and/or via user’s feed
• Users will be able to create a groups of his/her friends and very easy become a bookmaker him/her self.
• Tight integration inside facebook, may be using FBML.

Another very important feature that we’ve added recently (based on the feedback from Legolas) we are showing now user’s balance including the money he/she have already spend on the stakes which weren’t yet realized, for example if I had balance of 1000 and then put 500 on the football match next week, then until football match isn’t over others will see that I have 1000, however then match is over and results are known by freebookie I’ll either have 500 or more (in case I put my bet on the right result ).

UPDATE: In case you want to try new Facebook integration just login.

UPDATE: Facebook integration right now is limited to Single-Sign-On only case. More to come soon

It’s actually graphs. Generated real-time, directly from our database. They also looks pretty cool, for example here:

This is example picture generated run-time that shows a bet distribution on the boxing event (namely Miguel Angel Cotto (PUR) – Shane Mosley (USA), WBA Title).

Such graphs are generated for all our events and bets and you can easily export them and show on your website just by copying image URL. The looks rather tricky right now but we are planning to export them via RESTFull URLs that you can easily monitor your bets and bet distribution on your home page (or in your forum).

And that’s not yet all ! We have also new graphs that show in real time how much money our users have (we are community site therefore this information is open). Graphs are also quite bright and looking like this:

The image is appearing to be a bit corrupted because it’s too wide for the blog design, but if you click on it then you will see it whole . BTW the money shown on the graph is from our honored bookmaker Legolas who takes care that new boxing events are appearing inside Freebookie.

In the future we are planing possibility to generate multi-user graph where you will be able to directly see and compare how one user earns better than others, or if you have any other idea, feel free to post it to our Google code issue tracker.

For example when you are using Firefox (IMHO the best internet browser on the market!) then just go to the http://www.freebookie.org and click on the rss icon in the address bar:

When you click on the icon, you may choose how to read it, either you can use a internal Firefox reader or any other external reader (e.g. google reader) . If you choose internal firefox reader you might see Freebookie RSS feed directly in your browser:

When you click on the link you will be forwarded to the Freebookie Event description where you can directly login/register and bet on the event.

RSS feed gives you myriads of possibilities to access Freebookie content, for example you can use Google Desktop RSS gadget to see the Freebookie events on your desktop. Just use http://www.freebookie.org/rss feed URL to add it:

If you want to be informed about the Freebookie events when you are away from the PC (Mac), there is nothing simpler, just use Google Reader for Mobile or you can use a very nice Freebookie Widset or if you already have a Wildsets account then just click on the button

Anyways, features deployed today were developed with the help of subject matter expert Legolaz who is maintaining “manual” version of the freebookie on http://boxingtalk.ru. He gave us very good proposal about the features that required in the real life.

In the next postings I’ll ellaborate on the new features available in Freebookie.