Patent ID: 9713770
Date: 2017-07-25
CPC Classifications: A63F

Claim:
1. An online social networking system, comprising: means for receiving a request from a tournament creator to initiate a tournament; means for authenticating that the tournament creator is on the social networking system by providing identification parameters of the tournament creator to the social networking system; means for retrieving from the social networking system, a list of friends of the tournament creator; means for receiving a set of tournament parameters from the tournament creator, wherein the tournament parameters include a selection of tournament participants from the list of friends of the tournament creator on the social networking system; means for concurrently sending invitations to join the tournament to a plurality of client devices associated with the selected tournament participants utilizing a plurality of different communication platforms for the client devices, by generating for each selected participant, a communication platform compatible message for the client device of the selected participant, wherein the platform compatible messages include e-mail messages, cellular-based text messages, and social networking system messages; means for receiving notifications from the invited participants that accepted the invitations; and means for initiating a tournament on the social networking system including the participants that accepted the sent invitations according to the received set of tournament parameters.