Just reading Ben King’s latest at VeloNews and caught a link to his Strava Profile which regular users will quickly see is rather different from what we usually get. And like the rest of Strav’s offerings, it’s very well considered.
While this is clearly positioned as a Pro (athlete) page, it’s really very similar to what you might expect to find as a brand page on twitter or facebook though clearly relevant to the service at hand.
You can follow / fan Pros though unlike a usual view of another rider, you don’t get to compare yourself directly through the side by side view typically found. I’d actually really like to see this added as it’s a something you see frequently when interacting with others on the site.
There are quite a few new things clearly visible:
- Rider Bio
- Map of recent rides
- Race Schedule
- Sponsors and links out
- Fans
- Twitter content inclusion … interesting!
Strava has been adding features pretty rapidly for a while now and they’ve quickly become the defacto cycling tracking site. I’d expect to see more around pro tracking and fan engagement as the season starts to pick up. Adding in more linked riders for teams and pro comparisons on rides and segments would be particularly great to see. Of course Pro Teams need to buy in with sharing their data, but many do already just not perhaps at the same degree of intensity as the more enthusiast cyclist.
Additional nice to haves … at least from my perspective would be the ability to track and be notified when riders you follow post rides based on their shared race schedule. Fan discussion / debate could also become a lot of fun as well. That said, while strava does offer comments and kudos I can’t see it easily evolving into a discussion board and think that would take away from the core function which really is ride data visualization.
Great stuff – hoping to see more soon!