It isn’t all just awesome bells and whistles on the agenda at Smarkets HQ however. We’ve also been hard at work making the site even better for all those hardcore bettors as well. Not only have we revamped our search functionality to make it even easier to find that obscure football match we’ve also made available ALL of our match odds in a handy XML feed. This opens up a wealth of opportunities for the developers in our betting community as now they have access to every price in every market updated every 10 minutes. Couple this with the new Smarkets API that is currently in development and the amount of power at a Smarkets user’s fingertips is growing bigger everday. If you’re interested in either of these new features please email us for more details.

So whether it is Facebook for the fun of it, or a desire for data, there are less and less excuses for why you wouldn’t want to be part of the fastest growing Betting Exchange in the UK.

To get to the new page, click the ‘active bets‘ link from the bet slip at the top right of your screen. From the new active bets screen you can see the position you have bet on (with your profit and loss as usual), and if you click the ‘show all’ link, you can also see the full market. This means you can place bets on multiple events without having to switch between tabs or open new windows.

We’d love to know what you think of the feature, so either comment below or get in touch.

As you can see, when you open the betting window you can now toggle between ‘stake’ and ‘backer stake’ and your liability is shown in the same window.

You can set ‘backer stake’ to appear by default in your account settings but if you have any questions (and more feature requests) get in touch.

Whether you’re new to market trading and want to know about odds and risk management, or if you’re a little more advanced and looking for hedging and bookie bonus arbitrage tips, the Smarkets Academy should be able to answer your questions.

We’ll be adding content (and a search box) as we write it, but if you want something covered just let us know.

Join us to chat face to face with the team behind Smarkets and tell us about what you’re looking for in an exchange. Tell us what we’re doing wrong (and hopefully tell us why you love us!).

When:

6.30pm to 8.30pm on 14 October 2010

Where:

Smarkets’ Roof Terrace at White Bear Yard
144a Clerkenwell Road London EC1R 5DF

We’ll be providing drinks and nibbles, and you’ll have a chance to get an exclusive first look at some of Smarkets’ upcoming features. If you want to attend, please RSVP to chris.needham@smarkets.com. Spaces are limited but we look forward to meeting you!

Rather than over complicate our standard interface, at the top of every market you’ll see a link to ‘show market depth’. This will take you to a new, more advanced layout. The market depth view is a way of seeing exactly where the money is in the market so you can see exactly how much will be matched. We’ll be putting together a video to explain the market depth view in more detail once we’ve ironed out any kinks.

We’re showing three levels of depth for both bids and offers (‘for’ and ‘against’ in Smarkets terminology) and, differing from other market-based betting sites, we show the amount of money you need to place to match the bet. We’re also showing your profit and loss for each market so you can see exactly which positions you have and how much you’d stand to win/lose depending on different outcomes.

We hope you find this view useful and, as ever, we’d love to hear your feedback.

We’re now focussing on market depth (we’ve sent some concepts to members to see what they think about what we’re planning) and we’re about to massively expand the number of events we cover and the number of markets within each event.

Our new bonus and refer-a-friend schemes have gone down well but we’re going to continue to experiment with the best scheme to attract members who actually want to bet rather than people who are only in it for the bonus!

Feedback is really important (I know every company says that, but we mean it!) so we’ll be running more surveys, emailing members with concepts and thoughts and conducting tests of new functionality. Please get in touch with us and let us know what we could be doing better.

And the lucky fellow to be picked out of the hat to win a £100 risk free bonus was Robert W. from London. Congratulations!

We’ve also added a twitter invite button to the refer a friend page so you can tweet all your admirers with your referral code. Your follower will get a £5 risk-free bet when they make their first deposit, and you’ll get a tidy fiver for yourself. You’ll be the most popular tweeter in town.

While we’re on the subject of Twitter, you should follow @smarketsdaily if you want to be notified when we open brand new markets. Our main account (@smarkets) is for all our news, random musings and announcements. Follow both! Spoil yourself.

How does it work?

The Smarkets boffins put together a formula to calculate your score based on both your return on investment and the variety of markets you’ve successfully dabbled in over the last 30 days. We’ve designed it so you are comparing your predicting skills between your friends and not the amount of money you bet.

The leaderboard is then shown on your profile page with your current and best ever scores. Bragging rights abound!

Why are we doing it?

Well, we love comparing our winning streaks and best return between each other in the office and we wanted a way to do something similar between our friends. We’ll be extending the concept to create a leaderboard for all Smarkets members and we will be running competitions around custom leaderboards in the future. Find out who’s the ‘most accurate West Ham fan’ or the ‘most accurate bettor at Wimbledon’. But all that’s for the near future. At the moment it’s just a bit of fun between you and your friends.

Not keen on being on a leaderboard?

Don’t worry, you can opt out in your account settings and we only automatically added the people who already shared their visibility. So if you are set as ‘private’ we’ll never include you in new social features.

We’d love to hear what you think about features like this, so please get in touch either directly, or via the comments.

We’ve also tweaked the following concept a little so when two members follow each other they become ‘friends’. This extra-strength relationship means you have more control of who you share your data with and we can do some fun things like leader-boards and challenge-a-friend. The ‘followers’ concept still exists but your followers will just see your comments in their activity stream at the moment.

Lots more social stuff to come like sharing your winning streak, fan accuracy, and putting things on other sites such as Twitter and your blogs. Keep your eyes peeled for the updates and get in touch with us with feedback about what you think of all this social stuff.

* Graham Taylor would have clicked our ‘like’ buttons!