PGA Tour Shot Tracker Debut

There's a video posted at PGATour.com announcing what appears to be a new way to track players with Shotlink type information. And it's free. We'll see how much information it shares, but if it has some of ShotLink's data it ought to be a lot of fun to use.

Comments

[Erik J. Barzeski]

Take the %20 out of the URL, Geoff. That's a space character and it results in your URL being bad.

http://tinyurl.com/6otthd

[Huh]

Its been in "beta" for ages (which also has been free). For those used to TourCast, this thing is a big piece of junk in my opinion.

Graphics are too convulated, too small, the replay mode (which was just added two weeks ago) is bad, the shot data is wrong a lot of the time, etcetcetc

One saving grace... its free.

Still would rather pay for Tourcast though.

[Erik J. Barzeski]

I didn't mind paying for TourCast either and felt the value was "worth it." Not overwhelmingly, but enough that I bought it for 2 or 3 years.

I haven't done any beta testing of this service, but that's disappointing to hear it might suck.

[Geoff]

Thanks Erik, should be working now.

[Huh]

http://pgatourusergroup.wordpress.com/past-user-comments/

and

http://pgatourusergroup.wordpress.com/

are two good reads, especially the first link.

They are the beta users responses to how the product was conducted. (note since the start of the beta, only two functions have been added, the "replay" mode and a group mode.)

[Scotty]

Wow you people are hard to please. It has its glitches and occasional mistakes, but I have to say this feature is pretty cool. Worth every free penny of it.

[Steve]

Yeah totally agree with those who said this is a big piece of junk. I'm an old school TourCast guy and this "new" app is a major step backwards. Some of my biggest complaints are

-No audio notifications. How are you supposed to follow this?
-No ability to see how others have done on the hole (shot comparisons).
-Can't toggle to view the group ahead or behind.
-The course graphics are MUCH smaller and it makes finding the hole location difficult.
-No ability to toggle up and view the entire course at once.
-Can't "sit" on one hole and watch others play through.
-No little player icons that show when the player starts their swing/putt.
-No moving line of the ball path... rather a line just appears (with no sound).
-Can't click one button and watch a player's entire round from start to finish. Rather you have to click about 36 times to follow each shot.

It's funny how big corps like the PGATour will spin this as an "improvement" when we all really know this is a bigtime step backwards from TourCast.

Here's to watching less golf online.

-Steve (Atlanta)

[Tom Gordon / Westchester NY]

It's not as good as TourCast but not as bad as you make it out. Definitely better than just the play-by-play text on the leaderboard. What I don't understand is why they just couldn't have made TourCast free?

[Huh]

IBM and Pgatour parted ways (and some say on very bad terms), IBM must hold the rights to Tourcast, so thus the pgatour had to invent something new.

Too bad really, Tourcast is miles above this product.