It's been made abundantly clear that when Twitter is good, it's really good. You can keep up with the news faster than broadcast newscasters can report it, and chime in with your own commentary too. In terms of updating and broadcasting information across a wide range of people, Twitter has proven to be quite useful (when it's up and running, and not "stressed out" from too many tweets).
A new sports community called InGameNow, from the creators of the recently acquired beRecruited, adopts the Twitter method of disseminating user-generated information on sports news reporting and commentary. In addition, these Twitter-like updates are filtered based on votes, so the best updates can bubble to the top. In true sports community nature, users on InGameNow earn points for site participation, and can work their way up the rankings in order to become trusted users.
InGameNow is integrated with mobile phones, email, and IM clients like Gchat, so you can easily send and receive updates without having to go to the main website, and still stay connected while on the go. There's no SMS support yet, but it's on the way. What I didn't see is a way to redistribute InGameNow content to other places on the Web. When I asked InGameNow founder Ryan Spoon about this, he responded with the following:
Great question and product idea - there isn't [redistribution] at this moment but we are working on a couple distribution models (that are on the current roadmap):
- InGameNow widgets based on team, league and/or user
- integrating direct posting into facebook and blogs
Not distribution related - but we will shortly have integrated live scoring so that users can receive real-time scoring alerts and box scores... obviously in addition to user-generated results and analysis (which is what we are most excited about!).
Similar to Spleak, this last note mentioned by Spoon is a way of combining news with all the user-generated data. It's an optimization of the idea that having multiple access points to information that's relevant to a specific category lets you stay in the know at all times. There are update tools from broadcast and cable sports networks like ESPN, but InGameNow is a community first, so you're receiving content from users you trust, and you're also able to contribute your own two cents on a platform where you'll be heard.