Yahoo! Fantasy Sports is one of the biggest if not the biggest free online Fantasy Sports websites on this planet. This season for Salary Cap Football they’ve moved away from hosting it on their own website and moved the entire system onto Facebook. While this sounds like the signs of the times, this maybe well indeed backfire on them. The idea on paper is perfect; get social by implementing the game on Facebook and let the people play with all their friends! Too bad this may be a lack of foresight with the fantasy community.

I think there are a few fall backs to this new plan:

1. Fantasy sports is a time tested game of knowledge, stats, and a whole lot of luck. These games were once played with the newspaper and notepad the next day by adding up scores by hand. That also means that a lot of the older generation plays these games, and i’m pretty sure a majority of players of yesteryear don’t have a facebook account and care even less to create one.

1. My fantasy sports friends aren’t necessarily my friends. They’re purely people around the world bonded by the stats and facts of a particular sport. Beyond the talk of touchdowns, passing yards, or the amount of tackles that a team might have had, people don’t really go beyond that in conversation.

2. History: I have records that date back to the year 2000, and i don’t see those transferring over to fb. Part of the glory or humiliation is knowing stats of players, and your personal stats are just as important. The majority of people might not care that i won a particular league back in 2004, but to the other 11 people in that league its a major point brought up every year.

3. New Technology is always buggy. As a past developer the headaches of transferring one completely perfectly running software onto a new platform will always cause trouble for some lowly developer working into the night fixing bug after bug. Especially working with Facebook’s FBML or what ever they call it now is constantly being updated bringing in new functions and removing others.

4. After 10 years of being ahead of the game it appears that they’ve outsourced the game out to the game to a company that they purchased in this spring Citizen Sports, Inc.

On April 5 2010, Citizen Sports was acquired by Yahoo! and will soon become a part of the Yahoo! network of products and services. Information collected by Citizen Sports will continue to be subject to the Citizen Sports Privacy Policy. In the future, you may be asked to link your current Citizen Sports information to an existing or new Yahoo! ID. At that point, the Yahoo! Privacy Policy will apply to all information associated with your Citizen Sports account.

I’m seriously not hating the idea of what they’re trying to do, but i guess you can call my old school but i really don’t care for it. Maybe it was too large of step to take it straight to facebook. I would have preferred that they could’ve added some facebook connect functionality to their existing site so that you could post a taunt of your winning week to your opponent’s wall, or have a tool to remind players in your league to set their lineup for the week, but this just seems like moving from a perfectly running game into something else too fast.