Dan Peters and brother-in-law Michael Carroll spent a lot of time talking about sports, mainly who would win what game and why.

Each came to the conclusion that these conversations also ran their course among tens of thousands of other sports fans across the country.

And from that realization, an idea—a website where users could pick games, root for their team, compete with friends and become their own experts—a social sports network, pickaroo.com.

“We wanted to build a platform where we could formalize these kinds of conversations and discussions, and where people could voice their opinion on anything sports related,” Peters said.

Incorporating groups of friends, personalized profiles, records and different ways to pick games, Pickaroo provides a one of a kind website, hand tailored for the social sports aficionado.

Since its startup in early August, Pickaroo has registered close to 1,300 members and offers a unique blend of sports and social media.

“The one thing that we felt so strongly about, and the reason this idea came to fruition, is that we feel like Facebook is the end-all be-all for social networking, but we feel like it serves no purpose,” Peters said. “There's a lot of incessant babbling about, hey I just walked my dog, or I just did this or that. We think that social networking is going to become more compartmentalized into specific interests and we think that's why our site has a lot of potential.”

The site is set up in standard social network fashion, with a customized profile and home page, but the only action so far is picking NCAA and NFL football games, but Peters and company have plans to expand and include picks on hockey, baseball and NBA and NCAA basketball games.

“What you see on the site now is the bare bones, that's the base structure of what we do,” said Wesley Downs, market manager for the Auburn area. “We eventually want to add a news feed, kind of a streaming news service and maybe even incorporate a complete fantasy football league and maybe even develop something like that for the college level.”

The main features of the site so far are the Huddle, Survivor, Tailgate, Lock-er Room and Pick of the Week.

The Huddle is a chosen group of friends that makes picks each week, with members ranking the picks of the group from best to worst, while Survivor is an elimination game, where users compete by picking a different team each week and the last person standing wins.

Each user’s Tailgate is their group of friends that share comments, picks and chatter. The Lock-er Room, the page where picks are actually made, and Pick of the Week, each user’s most important game, are the bread and butter of the site.

Overall picks and POW records are tallied on each person’s profile, and Pickaroo’s own brand of status is assigned according to how accurate and consistent a user’s Picks of the Week are, with statuses ranging from Mush, “the ultimate loser” to Moby Dick, “the ultimate gaming whale.”

“I think the biggest challenge for us is, you know, you feel like you're throwing the greatest party of all time and you're just wondering if anybody is going to show up,” Peters said. “We’ve built our site, now how do we get everyone there?”

The answer to that question lies in part with the work of Downs and other marketing managers that are based at the University of Kentucky, the University of Maryland and one at the University of North Carolina.

Downs said his main job is to bring brand awareness to the company, working a beat of fraternities and other groups in the community, as well as Twitter and Facebook, to let the community know that Pickaroo is up, running and ready for action.

Sponsorships are one way Downs is getting people onto the site—going to fraternities and other groups, and when every member is registered, the group receives a no-strings-attached gift card of $100—$250 to spend as they wish.

“The theory is if we sponsor a fraternity to sign up 70 folks, they'll probably want more information and have friends that do as well,” Downs said.

Another aspect of Pickaroo is that it doesn’t require a daily commitment. A user can make picks on all the football games in just a few visits throughout the week.

"We've always believed that the whole buildup and anticipation of games on Saturdays and Sundays is all part of the fun," Peters said. “That's why I think we'll probably see a little bit more user activity in terms of signing up during the week.”

While there is no gambling or any affiliation with gambling on Pickaroo, it does adhere to betting lines and shows the picks of more than 1,000 football fans.

"We really do get a lot of good, witty analysis and some in-depth analysis in there as well,” Downs said. “It's something that can really help people that gamble on their own.”

Looking forward, Peters said the short term goal is to reach 10,000 users by the end of the year, and to be a one-stop shop for sporting news, fantasy games and general sports opinions among friends.

"We would like to grow to be the premier sports networking sites and we would like to become all-inclusive,” Downs said. “We would like to create something for the college game like what Yahoo! and stuff has done for the NFL game and for free, of course. That's the one core thing that's the base of our structure, we never charge for anything on the site."