Opening Day
Ballhype is now open to the public! You no longer have to be a member to view stories, but you still need to create an account to do any of the fun stuff — vote, comment, join a group, make a game pick, write or submit a story.
To all of the beta testers who provided feedback, pointed out bugs, and submitted some of the funniest sports stories I’ve ever read — thank you!! We’re intent on making Ballhype even better so keep the feedback coming.
Update: We’ve had a couple of great reviews so far on TechCrunch and louisgray.com.
Update 2: More from The Big Picture, franticindustries, and Pronet Advertising (by parislemon).
Update 3: The Ballhype Press Room has links to all of the reviews. The sports blogging community (and a few tech bloggers) really came through and supported the launch in a big way. Thank you!
Congratulations on opening day - and you can thank techcrunch for bringing me this awesome idea to my attention.
Hooray Web 2.0 - I will be notifying my New England Patriot faithful, expect us en masse.
[…] a service that just launched today is a Digg for Sports fans. We already have a Digg in multiple languages, a Digg for […]
Congrats on the launch. I have covered you guys here
http://startupmeme.com/2007/04/02/ballhype-is-a-digg-clone-for-sports-fans/
Congrats. Looks good. I’m just wondering out of curiosity how this differs from something like Yardbarker. I do like how the pages can be customized.
@ JoinIndy: Thanks - and bring them on! Can’t wait to see the Colts fans mess them up
@ Bilal: Thanks for the review - I know at first glance the easy comparison is to Digg but we’re hoping that with more users on the site, the community features become more apparent, since that’s who the site is ultimately for - sports fans.
@ Michael: This is kind of a long comment so my apologies, but you raise a good question that merits a thoughtful response.
Two big differences, related to the stories - 1) because we track and pull in the best content (as defined by inbound links) from 1600 sports blogs automatically, the site is already populated with really great stories with only a small number (up to now) of people using the site; and 2) finding and submitting content is so easy (see hot topics or latest posts pages for “undiscovered” stories) that even a less-than-fanatical sports fan like myself can get active on the site. The two of these combined we think will make for a larger, more active community which in turn will make the social aspects - comments, groups, game picks, more fun.
ps - glad you’re enjoying the site, and definitely send feedback our way if you have suggestions.
I just realized that my blog was listed under Spurs blogs so I don’t have to submit my own posts. That is definitely cool. I’m enjoying it more and more as I use it. I also like the game scores and predictions. You guys seem to have mashed a lot of features together in one nice package. Also, I realize you guys put this out there for that reason, but for a site I’m working on, I was going to bring in rss from several sources to display on the sidebar for latest headlines that weren’t written by site staff. It looks like using the Ballhype widget would be much easier and just wanted to make sure it was cool to have the Ballhype widgets across all pages of that site.
Absolutely, you’re welcome to put the widgets wherever you want. Let me know when they’re up and I’ll check it out!
[…] It wasn’t just Opening Day for the MLB. Ballhype officially opened its doors, as […]
BallHype - Social Networking for Sports…
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Wow - sorry for the messed up trackback above. The HypeIt Badges make WYSIWYG editors go nuts (at least mine did). When I had added a badge but tried to edit it again, it wiped out everything. Guess the editor I use (Xinha) didn’t like the JavaScript in the source. Will have to figure out a way so I can easily add badges. I know they’ve got plugins for Digg badges - I can probably whip one up for BallHype.