Stracka is a sports social network for golfers that describes itself as being "for people who love golf." My friend Mike asked me if I'd heard about it (and I hadn't) so I decided to check it out. I'll walk you through the registration process and then offer some thoughts.
Registration
When you decide to register, you put in your email address, password, choose a profile picture and then tell them a little bit more about what you're interested in (e.g., meeting other golfers, posting scores and photos, watching video fly-overs of courses, etc). Next you pick which home course/s you'd like featured on your profile. A list of courses nearby appeared automatically so I assume they're using my IP address to figure out my location--pretty cool.
The last step is inviting your friends to the site (if you want). You can put in their email addresses and customize a message that will be sent to them. I didn't like the fact that if you don't want to invite friends you have to click "I don't have any friends" in order to skip this step.
Your Profile
After registration you can choose to further customize your profile by letting people know what's in your bag, when you can play, if you gamble, and give more details about yourself. You can also upload pictures and change your location by dragging your avatar to a different spot on Google Maps. Your default location is detected automatically.
Using the site
There are a variety of things you can do on Stracka. You can find other golfers, golf courses, see pictures, view member blogs and participate in forum discussions. The golf course directory has an interactive Google Map that looks confusing at first, because it has a 100s of golf courses in the US marked with pin-points. But when you zoom in, it's pretty useful so you can see which golf courses are in your area, if you don't know. One thing that was confusing about the golf course directory is for each state, Stracka lists the top 10 golf courses. It wasn't clear who picked this top 10. Is it the site owners? Is it the users? Are courses paying to get in the top 10? It was nice that you can click on any golf course and get an overhead view of it through Google Maps.
A cool feature that Stracka offers is the ability to track your scores and handicap. You can select a course and put in your scores and advanced info like number of pars/birdies/bogies, greens in regulation and average driving distance. Then you can compare your statistics vs. an average PGA TOUR player or Tiger, Phi, Vijay, Trevor Immelman or Retief Goosen. You can also compare your stats with your friends who are on Stracka.
No video??
The one major thing that is lacking on Stracka is video. Golf offers countless opportunities for video instruction, swing analysis, putting and chipping tips, etc., but there is nothing like this on Stracka. This is unfortunate as they are missing a huge opportunity to engage users with this content, from professionally-produced video, to user-generated content.
Another thing that annoyed me was I couldn't find a link or way to log out of the site once I was logged in.
Key Statistics (as of May 16, 2008)
- Compete.com - 9k uniques in April
- Domain age - July 18, 2001
- PR 4
- Pages indexed in Google - 42,000
- Alexa Rank - 145,492
That's it for my review of Stracka. Do you have anything to add? Also, do you know of any other golf social networks?