Q: What is the purpose of Fancred? How is it different from other social media networks that are out there?  
A:We are trying to make it easier for you as a sports fan to have conversations on your mobile devices with your friends, experts and other people that you follow and about teams, games and sports that are interesting to you. So far, the bloggers, sports writers, beat reporters and journalists we have on Fancred are from major publications, such as USA TODAY, SB Nation, Sports Illustratedand Bleacher Report, so it is a good way for them to promote their work.
Other social media networks are great, but because they are not focused on sports, you cannot go there to have the best sports conversations. We think sports is a big enough category with enough passionate fans and people that it should have its own social network, and that is what we are trying to build.
 
Q: How can people sign up and get involved with Fancred?
A:At this point, when you download Fancred onto your phone, the sign-in page is through Facebook log-in only, and it is strictly a way for us to authenticate you as a real person. We think it makes the community that much better because people are having real conversations and they are not hiding behind a pseudonym or username. I know that people have a lot of concerns over other apps posting on their Facebook wall, but we will never do that. Privacy is very important to us, so we will never post on your behalf and we will never take your data without you knowing. We are working on ways where we can expand to not just Facebook log-in, but for now, that is the fastest and easiest way.
As a participant in Fancred, everyone has what we called a Fancred score. It is a one to 100-point scoring system that measures your activity and the response that you get for your activity inside Fancred. If you post a lot and people respond to what you post by giving you an “up-vote” or “down-vote” or by commenting on your post, that increases your score. So, the score is a really good way for fans that are really active and passionate to differentiate themselves and build a following. We are trying to give sports fans a better way to find other like-minded sports fans, so the Fancred score allows you to find other fans that you think are entertaining, knowledgeable, funny or credible.
We have put a lot of emphasis and focus on the design and the usability of the app. We want to make it easier for you to get all the information, but we also want to make it easy for you to get team-specific information as well, so you can filter content based on the teams or people that you follow. For instance, I am a Mississippi State fan, but I am also a Boston fan (Red Sox, Celtics and Patriots) because I have lived here for so long. I have feeds in the app that allow me to switch back and forth to see what people are saying about my specific teams. I can also go to what we call the Sports Feed, which is a general feed of everybody that I follow, and it is one area where everybody is talking (about all kinds of) sports (and teams), and I can just browse that.
 
Q: How did the official launch in mid-March go, and how is the app being received thus far by users?
A:We have had thousands of downloads and thousands of Mississippi State fans using it. We even have Scott Stricklin, Shane Power and Tyler Russell all on Fancred, so we are growing the Mississippi State audience pretty heavily. On the first day that we launched, we made No. 25 in the iTunes App Store for free sports apps, so that was a really big milestone for us.
 
Q: What features do you foresee you and your team devising and adding to the app and how often? What are your goals for the future?
A: We are building up for Android soon, and we have not finalized that release time yet but probably over the next couple of months.
Obviously, we would love to have as many Mississippi State fans on Fancred as possible. If a lot of MSU fans use it and a lot of fans use it throughout the country, we will be able to sort of aggregate who has the highest score among fan bases as well. I definitely want to work with MSU and its athletic department to make sure that as many fans as possible are using it, so we can increase the collective score of MSU students. I would love to be able to brag about my alma mater having a really high Fancred score.
Searching is something that we are going to contribute to very quickly because there’s not a really great way yet to search for people that you are trying to find. So, we are going to add a search feature that allows you to just type in somebody’s name, pull them up and decide to follow them if you want.
We have a vision of evolving the score to where it really does capture your entire sports life, so over time, we want to be able to do more cool things like adding polls and quizzes, allowing fans to check into and answer questions about games and even throwing in some rewards and awards if someone has a high Fancred score. I believe credibility is something you earn, so we are looking for different ways to make sure that you earn a certain Fancred score and that you have got to work hard to keep it.
We will probably release (new) features frequently, so we will probably just do small releases every several weeks. The app is free, and we do not have any (future) plans whatsoever of charging fans to download or use it.