We are getting closer at last. After a long period to try to find a designer to make pool-mates look as it should we finaly received the final designs around a week ago. Since then we've been doing nothing else but trying to re-skin the whole website and this is the result so far:

Homepage

Profile page

We believe this is a big improvement from the grey website we had so far, so please let us know what you think :)

Hi again. This is an amendement to the last article where I showed you some tournament screenshots including the fixtures for group stage. We've put together the KO fixture presentation layer now. The system will decide what is better to do based on the number of entries. So byes and preliminary rounds will be created where necessary.

KO draw with a preliminary round (17 runners)

KO draw with a BYE (15 runners)

Although the tournament screens are not finished yet, I decided to share some screenshots with you guys. Bare in mind that these pages are effectively just mockups for now. We will revisit and try to make everything look flashier ... but for now this will give you an idea.

1. Event basic configuration. This will only be shown to the organiser when setting up the event. The users will obviously have a different view

2. Venue information. This will give all the users the ablility to see the place where the tournament is held and get directions based on their pool-mates registered address.

3. The players of the tournament. People will be able to register via this page and the organiser can invite and add even non pool-mates users to the draw

4. The draw and results of the tournament. The tournament I've set up here is a multi-stage tournament of group stages and followed by a knock out stage. For now we've only implemented the UI for groups and swiss system, we are currently working on Knock out and Double Elimination

5. And this is how the organiser will update the scores for the matches.

OK guys, that's it for now. Thanks for checking this out and we always welcome feedback.

Hi all,

Just finished working on the "tournament engine" of poolmates. This is effectively the piece of code that will be used to automatically generate the fixtures of the events, resulting of matches and events and generally handling the functionality needed to run mutlistage tournaments that the website will support. There were quite a few challenges faced in this phase and most importantly the implementation of a pairing system for swiss system tournaments.

This is a step closer to finish off the work needed for organising and running events but unfortunately there is still a lot of work to be done. We really aim for releasing the first version of the website by the end of the year ... nearly 2 years after we started development.

So rock on and stay tuned !

I am sure many of you visit this blog several times a day hoping for exciting news (well at least my mate Rob does :)).

Anyway, we've been recently finishing off the social aspects of the website. By that I mean the interaction of the players of the website, friendships, personal information and news feeds. Currently the development is focused on the event organising which will be the heart of www.pool-mates.com. We are still trying to architect the system in a way that it can support multiple event types like:

• Groups (round robin)
• KO
• Double elimination
• Swiss System
• and the combination of all the above

Also adding support for leagues that can hopefully be used by many people out there already running leagues. Yes you've heard correctly, you will be able to get rid of the horrible excel sheets that you use to work out the rankings, fixtures etc.. :)

That's it for now, I will come back soon (this time I mean it) with more details.

Take care

Hi everyone,

I know development is going slower than expected, but I am trying to put as much of my free time on this as possible. And for you out there that know what development is like this takes time :)

In any case there is some progress done. Internationalization framework is all completed, and the profile pages are being slowly done. For now registration and the picture gallery functionalities are done.

This is how the homepage/registration will look like. It is simple, you can either register or log in to your account via this page.

This is an idea of how the profile will look. For now we have concentrated mostly on the gallery as we know how important aspect this is to a social networking website.

As you can see the name of the guy is "Awesome Pool Player".....hmmm what a modest user :)

And adding a new album

And how view picture mode, with commenting and a lot of other features.

Ok guys, this is it for now. Please let me know what you think and what we can improve.

More to come ..... promise :)

As we speak pool players from all over the world compete for the world 9 ball pool championship in Doha - Qatar. Although all the big stars are there it looks like everyone is struggling. Many players from UK already stated that the break format and the generous pockets were a big problem, since the gap between the players is narrowed dramatically. This resulted players like Daryl Peach and Darren Appleton to buy an early ticket home.

The 1 ball was on the spot, magic rack was used and the pockets were like buckets. This means that players could get away with soft breaking with the wing ball always being pocketed in the corner and a shot on the next ball. Winners break meant that players could just stay on the (easy) table until they make a mistake or run out of luck in the break.

I am a firm believer that the game needs to become a proper sport. And like almost all sports the best players win. Unfortunately people so far have failed to apply a format which will favor the best players. 9 ball on the spot and alternate breaks is the way forward for me. Although many might argue that the winners break format is the way that the game was always played, I will argue that in the modern pool world matches it becomes a one man's game (and not the best man's game). Competition is to give both players equal chances to stay ...

Unfortunately the progress of the project is not as we anticipated/hoped. This is due to increased amount of work I had the last few months that did not allow me to dedicate my self as much as I would like in this project.

The only thing that is for sure is that this is still going on. I would really like to thank people that are still signing up to this website although there is no advertising campaign going on for the last few months. This is an indication that a social website for pool players is needed.

So keep your eye for that email because it will arrive for sure at some time in the future :)

We've been seing a lot of traffic the last few days on the website and we would like to thank everyone for the interest.

This is why we feel that we owe you an update on what we are working on. As previously mentioned, this website is aiming to create local communities as well as a global one. This is why we want to launch this website translated into your language from day one. So for now we are working on the internationalization framework we will be using, since the rest of the development needs to take seriously into account that this is going to be a multilanguage system.

We are also looking for translators for any language.

If you are interested contributing please contact us on admin@pool-mates.com.

Note that we will not start translating from now, and it is expected to start the actual translation around the end of April.

Hey everyone, we are still alive.

First of all I would like to thank everyone that signed up with pool-mates.com and are waiting for a release date. We are working hard to release this website as soon as possible but we do have a long way to go.

So this article is all about the feature list that we are planning to provide in the first release. Any feedback on what you would like to include will be extremely helpful, as this is all about you the users.....and after all this is what this blog is about ;).

First of all, a few things about the registration process (that we are currently working on). This will be as simple as you can imagine, as we are all aware of how boring registration pages are! Though for you to use this service properly you will need to fill some details in your profile.

Talking about the profile. The profile is the main page that you are all aware from other social networking services, but in this case it will be more than that. It will contain all the traditional features of social networking websites but slightly more pool specific......like :

• Your profile picture
• Friend list
• Groups
• A wall-like feed box
• Your personal information about pool-snooker-billiards preferences
• Your awards and achievements
• A calendar to organise your activities within the website
• ......but this is not IT!

Of course, this is just the start and it's NOT what this website is about ...

From today this blog supports rss feeds for easy access to the website's news. Since the blog is in it's beginning there are no filtered feeds (aka tags,dates etc..). The feed is accessible via the left panel.

Please let us know if this was helpful or not.

Pool-mates.com wishes a very good year to everyone and with a lot of pool.

Don't forget that this will be the year that this website will launch the first release hopefully with many to follow.We hope that this attempt will establish a new way on how pool players worldwide communicate and events are (or should) be organized.

The plan is to launch as soon as possible, but the most realistic period of time is during the summer. Though through this blog we will announce the progress in the development and ask for you feedback as we develop.

So keep in touch.

So, why are we doing pool-mates.com and what is it about ?

The whole thing began from what I would actually want, and can't find right now on the Web. This is a place that I can find people with the same interest as me based on my location. I would particulartly want this in order to meet up with people that really care about the game and play a few frames. In a few clubs, including my home club, there are people that go there every day and therefore you can just show up and challenge them. But these pool clubs are not everywhere, and I run into this problem when I moved to the UK where I haven't still found clubs like that. I'm sure that there are other people here that have the same problem as I've seen posts in forums from people asking others to meet up for practice racks. But this is not the solution to the problem in my opinion.

And this is what pool-mates.com is all about !!

It's a social networking website but is more than that. It's a platform for pool/snooker/billiard players find people to play with. It is also a place for every one of us to keep a pool profile and exchange opinions, organise events, publish news and basically know each other. All of this in a local and world wide scale.

Talking about the scale, this is intended to be ...

Hi everyone,

This is the first blog article with hopefully many to follow. Soon we will provide details about this new website via this blog.

If you don't care about the content of the website and you want to sign up anyway you are free to do so from the homepage. :)