11/17/2004 11:34:41 AM|||Shep|||This can be considered part 2 of my comparison of Yahoo and AOL's fantasy basketball services...

Results (aka Stats)

They've been changing things on nearly a daily basis since before the season started... and things still aren't all there. They did make it easier to find current and past results, but player-by-player results are still not available. You can only view your total points by position vs. the other team you're playing. As a friend put it "How hard is it to put the results in? Just tell me where to write the code, and I'll do it!"

I'll have to check again tonight, but I think Yahoo took away live updating when they ended their StatTracker free trial. If that is the case, and AOL continues to provide live updates while adding in a competent results page, I will change the winner of this category to AOL. If Yahoo thinks they can get away with charging me $7.95 just to have live updating they're wrong about that. That is something that should be free. I'm okay with them making me (and others) pay for StatTracker... but not providing results that can be refreshed on a web page is a basic necessity. Managers should be able to check those scores at night before they go to bed and not be forced to check in the morning after the games are all over.

Winner: Yahoo (cause I have yet to see all of AOL's results)

Trading/Free Agents

Evidently, AOL decided that since Yahoo only offered search of players by last name, they didn't need to do any better than that. Frankly, it kind of sucks. It's hard to spell some of these guys names. You think they could implement a partial work search so something like "James" would come up with LeBron, Jerome, and even James Posey... Really, how hard would that be? As my friend said "How hard is it [to look up guys by last and first name]? Just tell me where to write the code, and I'll do it!" It's probably in SQL right?

That said... I like AOL's system for Trading and picking up Free Agents. That really means that it works, and it's a fairly painless process. Oops... I just checked, I'm not sure that you can pick up free agents anymore... You see, this is the growing pains AOL is going through.

Winner

Draft

That's right! The draft tab is still there! Thank you AOL!!!! Where are the draft results on Yahoo?? Can you find them? And when you do, can you sort them by round, team, position, etc.? I didn't think so.

Winner: AOL
|||110071191428431486|||Update on AOL vs. Yahoo (aka Pt. 2)