That’s right, Yahoo, has introduced AJAX to almost every single American man and he probably didn’t even notice it. Alas, but this Yahoo fantasy football veteran did take notice and rejoiced! If you don’t play fantasy football I’m sorry to bore you here but Yahoo Fantasy Football is the epitome of mainstream America, and that Yahoo had the forward thinking to incorporate AJAX into it merits notice.

Fantasy Football 2.0
So as I was checking my stats for Chris Chambers (Miami Dolphins stud wide receiver who is single-handedly being made to suck by Daunte Culpepper, read more about the Culpepper effect here), I noticed that Yahoo Stat Tracker had been AJAX’ified since last year. I can’t explain the joy of seeing your point total increase on the fly so smoothly, but suffice to say it merits excessive jumping and high-fiving. Of all the implementations of AJAX that I have seen, this is by far the best demonstration of how AJAX should be used. It was subtle, as AJAX should be, the real time scoring delay was miniscule, and Yahoo has shown that they didn’t just put AJAX into the application to have it, but actually thought about how it should be used. Yahoo hired good, dare I say great, web designers, and hit one out of the park with this one. Unlike most Web 2.0 applications out there that put AJAX everywhere on their site, Yahoo chose to incorporate AJAX, celebrating the positives that a web app with AJAX can bring without shouting “Hey, look at me I’m using AJAX, um…can I get $2M in VC money”.

parting thoughts…
So I say hats off to you Yahoo, you’ve merged my two favourite things, Football and Web 2.0. Now if you could only mojo Daunte Culpepper into throwing to Chris Chambers more, then we’d really have something special.

share this story