If you’re going to launch a website that seeks to compete with mainstream sports content providers as well as wildly popular social-networking sites such as Facebook, you had better know what you’re doing. There’s little worry about that when you’re a former Yahoo! executive who last headed sports, entertainment and studios before leaving the company in 2006.

That’s the background that David Katz brings to the new site SportsFanLive.com, which has launched its beta version for public use.

Katz sees shortcomings for sports fans in the currently mass-produced formats mentioned above. He told The New York Times that the major sports sites “are fundamentally all the same — imbued with traditional media DNA … and not built for the next generation and for the evolving needs of sports fans.”

As for existing social networks, Katz says that although there are sports presences, the sites don’t really reach out to fans in particular.

“Facebook and other social network sites do a good job of connecting you to people all over your life, but it’s not relevant to your sports interests,” he told the Times. “We’re isolating that subset of sports friends and giving you instant communication with them.”

Katz, who also formerly worked for CBS, touts the aggregation of information sources in his new venture. He says that Sports Fan Live will draw from about 4,500 providers, rather than the hundreds he says mainstream sports sites tap.

Although Katz decided not to run any fantasy games through the new site, the venture — if successful — could be another way for fantasy players to connect, as is the case with recent social offerings by The Fantasy Football Times and FanSoft Media. One particularly interesting tool is the FanFinder, which purports to allow users to locate other fans of specific teams so that folks might gather to watch games.

It would be easy for a startup site to get crushed in the rush to combine sports and social networking right now, but the experience, capital and positioning brought by Katz at least gives SportsFanLive.com strong initial standing.

Company: TheFantasyFootballTimes.com
Site: www.thefantasyfootballtimes.com
Founder and CEO: Greg Bebezas
Lauched: 2003
Full time: 2003

What do you do if you’ve been playing fantasy football for about a decade and you feel like punishing yourself with a startup business? If you’re Greg Bebezas, you jump on the Web and launch a fantasy-content site.

“I had been involved in fantasy football as a consumer since 1992, so seeing the continued growth of the fantasy sports industry over the years, I decided that the time was right for me to get involved on the business end,” Bebezas says. “I had always wanted to go into business for myself and this was the perfect opportunity for me to finally do so.”

Bebezas made the most of his involvement in an entrepreneurial business program at the time and developed a plan for what soon became TheFantasyFootballTimes.com. He says that his desire was to provide strong fantasy football content and present it as cleanly as preseason magazines, which he says other sites at the time were failing to do.

Bebezas threw mostly his own funds — along with some private-investment capital — behind the venture and launched in 2003. He concedes that his background as an architect didn’t do much to prepare him for entry into the fantasy sports industry or the business of running a website, and there were some early struggles. He calls his chief technology officer, Chris Jewer, “instrumental” in delivering the company to its current state.

“Web-based businesses can’t be successful without a concerted effort from both the business and technical sides, and we’re constantly working together to grow and adapt the company,” Bebezas says.

The latest outgrowth is “My FF Times,” a social network that’s debuting for this season and is free to join. The point of the network is to create a community of fantasy football players who can view each other’s rosters and offer suggestions on things such as trades and player pickups. Just like with major social networks, participants in My FF Times can add other users as friends, or in this case “teammates.”

Although such roster recommendations and peer advice have long been occurring via message boards and forums, Bebezas believes My FF Times makes it easier for people to connect and share information. The community, for instance, allows users to enter multiple lineups, so that all of their players can be visible at all times (rather than the often-problematic and tedious method of copying and pasting your roster into a message-board post).

“The driving force behind providing an environment like this is that we know there are a lot of knowledgeable fantasy players out there that can help each other win,” Bebezas says.

In addition, TheFantasyFootballTimes.com continues to provide its annual online draft guide (cost: $9.95), which has twice earned a spot as a finalist for a Fantasy Sports Trade Association award. The site also offers “No Huddle News,” a feature added in 2007 that funnels football content from various other sites through the Fantasy Football Times homepage. Bebezas says this quickly became the most popular destination on the site.

“This has all been part of an ongoing effort to give our users a combination of free and premium tools and resources that help them find the necessary info and expert content they’re looking for without spending hours on end,” Bebezas says. “From the beginning, I’ve felt that building a brand, a good reputation, and gaining credibility within the market was of great importance for a content provider like us.”

Business partners of TheFantasyFootballTimes.com include Mock Draft Central, Jostens and SportsBuff.com, which is owned by the same company that owns this site (and for which I also write).