Citizen Sports Teams up with Sports Illustrated

Via Techcrunch Citizen Sports is teaming up with Sports Ilustrated to develop Facebook Apps devoted to sports enthusiasts.  The apps will include stat tracking, live draft capabilites, and other features that fantasy players use.  Originally the group who created Pro Trade is now Citizen Sports and Pro Trade is one of the companies underneath Citizen Sports.  Pro Trade is basically a stock market for sports players based on fantasy stats.

Citizen Sports is led by Jeff Ma who was one of the original MIT blacjack players that inspired the book Bringing Down the House and Mike Kearns. 

It is really interesting that Citizen Sports has moved away its focus from Pro Trade.  Landing the deal with Sports Illustrated was probably key in orchestrating the new company which will devote a lot of its time towards Facebook apps.  With fantasy sports being such an interactive experience we find it hard to believe that a facebook app would be how people compete.  We see destination websites being much better at fantasy sports.  They are probably more likely to attract the passive fantasy player.