Ballhype - Social Media Sports Done Right

In an effort to expand beyond their technology-centric core, last summer Digg launched a Sports category. While it received some attention, it has largely been neglected by the community due to an understandable lack of interest. A new service called Ballhype, hopes to succeed where Digg has failed. To say Ballhype is simply a Digg clone for sports would be an absolute disservice to the site.

Ballhype is a social news site that that focuses solely on sports, but it uses the sports news as a method to spur other means of interaction between site users. There is the obvious option to add friends, but there is also the option to join groups based on your sports likes and dislikes, declare your favorite teams, players, and sites from which you get your sports news, and the Ballhype Stat Sheet, which gives you a user score based on your activity on the site.

One of the key features of the site is the ability to predict individual game's scores.

Hovering over the word 'Games' in the main menu will give you a drop down in which you select a sport. From there you are taken to a screen with all of the games for the current day and using a calendar on the right you can select any future day. It's a one-click process to select the team which you think is going to win, and you can see the other users who agree or disagree with you. You can even leave comments for each individual game to talk some smack. On your stat sheet there is a win/loss record which records the accuracy of your predictions.

Yes, there is a Top Users page which highlights both the most active users and the ones who are best at predicting outcomes. The activity scores are tallied based on the level of interaction your submitted stories and comments have gotten. The Picks score is a bit more comprehensive:

Points are awarded based on how many people pick each team. You get more points for picking upsets. Each person who picked the losing team gets -1 point. All of the losing points are then added together, along with 1 bonus point, and divvied up among the winners.

So if a game has two users and they both pick the winning team, they each get 0.5 points. If one had picked the winning team and the other had not, the loser would get -1 point, and the winner would get 2 points.

If you're someone who liked the competition in climbing up Digg's Top User list, you will love Ballhype's Top User list.

The site pulls in stories both automatically via RSS feeds and by user submissions. These user submissions can either be URLs of stories or simply a story/new blurb that is written on the spot a la Technorati's WTF. Clicking on the Latest Posts tab takes you to an RSS feed of stories (from any of the 1,600 sports sites/blogs that Ballhype is currently following) which any user can "hype up" simply by pressing the up arrow and filling out the story information. This is an incredibly easy way to promote user submissions, rather then have them go out and find the stories, all one has to do is search in this tab (though manually finding stories is of course still an option).

Ballhype clearly has placed an emphasis on the fan. A drop down menu on the front-page allows you to select your locale (all the major cities with sports teams are represented) and all of your news will be related to that area. Likewise searching for a team name will bring up all the teams that share that name and you can select the one you want and get a wide overview of their news.

The features which are common to other social news sites include the vote up feature (which dictates what will make the 'Most Hyped' section of the front-page), a vote down feature if you disagree with a story being newsworthy, a comments button that takes you right to the comment section (which Ballhype clearly hopes will be a big area for fan interaction/debate), a links button which shows you all the sites that are currenly linking to the story, and tags to group and categorize everything.

Ballhype certainly looks like the social site that does sports right. My only concern is that there are simply too many options for what a user can do, and some may get overwhelmed and lost in the process. Be sure to sign up and check it out for yourself.

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Startup Meme, April 2, 2007: “Ballhype is a Digg Clone for Sports Fans” — Ballhype a service that just launched today is a Digg for Sports fans. We already have a Digg in multiple languages, a Digg for tutorials, a Digg for Photos, Slashdot also wanted to look like Digg, and now finally the sports fan should have their digg...

Louis Gray, April 2, 2007

Ballhype absolutely is sports and social media done right. I see it as Digg + SportsBlogs Nation with a little Google and live scoreboards thrown in for good measure. I've enjoyed it for more than a month during the closed beta, and almost am wistful over keeping it to myself! It's a great service. Anybody who loves sports and tech will find themselves on the site A LOT. I know I have.

Jason Gurney, April 2, 2007

Thanks for the review! We're looking forward to seeing the results of a much larger community on the site.

Jeremy Luebke, April 2, 2007

Very nice take on a social media site. This is more of the future. Digg can't be all things to all people so there is definitally room for more sites like this.

Darren, April 2, 2007

Why was the Digg readers lack of interest "understandable"?

MG Siegler, April 2, 2007

I say understandable because a) digg was and still is a primarily tech news website and b) because nearly everything that was found in digg's sports section was simply a rehash of ESPN.com or CNNSI.com, there was no real variety.

Darren, April 2, 2007

Fair enough (and I think Digg's categorization is totally ridiculous) though the blame for the sports content lies with Digg users. They're apparently not interested in the sports.

Steve James, April 2, 2007

We are definitely going to be seeing more sites like this, taking the Digg concept and applying it to different niches. In fact, I'm working on one right now...

Jeremy Toeman, April 2, 2007

Ballhype doesn't really cater to "sports fans", it caters to "Web 2.0 fans who like sports". For a site like this to be even moderately successful it needs to reach out to a mass audience, not techies. It's a nice-looking site, and a nice idea, but this is ALL about marketing, and BIG marketing to the masses, not niche marketing to techies. I wish them luck, but without a whole lotta money I just don't see how they are going to make this fly...

Darren, April 2, 2007

Jeremy: I'd even narrow that group to "American Web 2.0 fans who like sports". There are no custom dashboards outside of Canada, and they use the term 'soccer' to describe what 95% of the world calls 'football'.

Steve James, April 2, 2007

Good point Darren, I didn't even think of that. They did just come out of a private beta. Wonder if they including anyone outside N.A.?

Darren, April 2, 2007

Er, whoops, that's no custom dashboards outside of the US. I'm in Canada, and custom dashboard free.

MG Siegler, April 2, 2007

@Darren, Jeremy, and Steve: those are all fair points.

The site will need to market itself really well in order to branch out beyond the perhaps narrow tech savvy (American) sports fans, but that is no doubt their goal.

In my opinion it has some great features that could further enhance a sports lovers devotion to sport, team, or player but getting the word out there about the service will be difficult as many sports fans know two URLs for sports: ESPN.com and CNNSI.com.

Word of mouth will be huge for this site.

I'm sure if the site does hit it off with the major American sports, it'll grow into other, more worldly-sports.

Jason Gurney, April 2, 2007

Darren & Steve-

Yes, it's true that our database is largely U.S.-centric today (although we do have Canadian NHL/NBA/MLB teams as well as the EPL). We are planning to expand our focus to additional regions (and sports) going forward.