Playup - The Insider

Facebook Application

The Concept

The Insider is a Facebook application that allows users to predict the starting line-up for their preferred football team. Points are awarded for each playing in the starting 11 players that the user correctly guesses. Bonus points are also awarded for users who make earlier predictions - the earlier they make their prediction, the more points they will receive for correct guesses. Users can then view their position in the overall league table, or their position in a league consisting of their Facebook friends.

The Technology

The Insider is an iframe based Facebook application. It is fully localised and internationalised, supporting four languages from launch - English, Portuguese, Italian and Japanese.

The site was built with an MVC structure, using PHP and the Zend Framework, with a MySQL data store. Extensive use of the framework's components was made including Zend_Db, Zend_Locale and Zend_Translate, thus allowing many of the project's components to be reusable. It is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Relational Database Service (RDS). A number of 3rd party APIs are utilised including Facebook Connect (including using Facebook's JavaScript SDK), Twitter OAuth and MailChimp.

Playup - The Insider Screenshot