The next time the internet explodes over Peyton Manning’s inevitable choke job or Johnny Manziel’s debaucherous Las Vegas shenanigans, it could be all primarily divulged through Facebook, not Twitter.
In a move that’s been made to obviously compete with the chronological, simple-to-post Twitterverse, Facebook is rolling out a new platform for this weekend’s NFL championship round called Sports Stadium, a hub that will be dedicated only to fans wanting to chat about the game, see real-time stats and read fresh takes by experts.
According to reports on Thursday, the new sports hub on the social network will allow users to toggle between tabs, showing fans real-time comments from friends, in-game statistics, even play-by-play commentary through a partnership with a company called Sportradar.
“It’s a second-screen experience that we hope makes watching the broadcast even better,” Steve Kafka, product manager of Sports Stadium said, in a post announcing the new project. Unlike the typical Facebook News Feed, the information appearing about big sporting events will appear in real-time and in chronological order, the key feature which makes Twitter the go-to social network for conversations around sporting events at the moment.
This announcement makes sense. If you’re a sports fan on Facebook you’ve likely seen something at the top of your newsfeed inviting you to –and I may be paraphrasing here — ‘join the conversation’ and ‘see what your friends are saying’ during large sporting events. I know I saw something like it during Jan 11’s College Football National Championship game. Seems like Facebook was doing a little test drive.
Facebook will be running Sports Stadium to iPhone users in the U.S. first before moving onto other sports and platforms.
Josh Helmuth is the editor of Crave Sports. Follow him on Twitter or like the channel on Facebook. He’ll give you a virtual high-five.
