Earlier this week, I noticed that Nokia has been neglecting the SportsTracker service over the past several months. You can read the full post here, but basically, Nokia is not making the touch version readily available, silently discontinuing the Facebook app, and making it a hassle to post workouts to Twitter and other social networks. It would appear, from this, that Nokia is letting SportsTracker, one of its more innovative and mature services, die a slow and painful death.
However, hidden in a mostly unrelated post, Charlie Schick, on his way out from Nokia Conversations, has given us the facts about what’s really happening with SportsTracker. According to Charlie:
Nokia is not killing Sports Tracker, but giving it some wings and will discontinue the Nokia Sports Tracker beta towards the end of 2009 migrating it to Sports Tracking Technologies, a company founded by the creators of Sports Trackers (Ykä Huhtala and Jussi Kaasinen, if you care to know). Given more breathing room, the Sport Tracker guys will be able to start developing other related sports apps.
I’m not entirely certain this will be a good move, and I’m still rather annoyed that Nokia hasn’t put more resources into this awesome service. However, Ykä Huhtala and Jussi Kaasinen, the founders of SportsTracker, have done a bang-up job thus far, so I certainly don’t have any doubts as to their abilities to build the service to greater heights.
My biggest concern is that Nokia is going to botch this ‘migration’ pretty bad, with users losing workout history, having to rebuild profiles, and that sort of thing. Let’s hope that’s not the case. What do you think?
