Well, not quite. But after some early bumps in the road I'm actually impressed with a couple of things that ESPN.com is doing these days. First what they are STILL missing:
- They still don't provide RSS feeds for some of their most popular content, including the pride of Holy Cross, Bill Simmons.
- Although they are on Twitter, I'd really like more specific ESPN Twitters, say one just for Boston sports or MLB...this may be out there but I can't find it on Twitter nor on ESPN.
- The chat functions on the site are horribly integrated and primitive.
That is a mighty short list actually, and I'm really not sure why all three won't be fixed within the next few months.
Now let's get to the really cool stuff, and it all begins with WIDGETS!
- You can add dozens of pieces of content from ESPN directly onto your site...NBA Standings, NHL Scoring Leaders, News Scroll, etc. I love this ability, certainly not applicable for my site, but I can see it being used elsewhere.
- Their blogs are actually...well...blogs, unlike SI. Gammons seems to be truly embracing the model. The issue however is that much of the premium content is still locked away for members-only. I guess that gets us into more of a revenue discussion, but since it truly is good stuff I'm willing to dish out the dollars, but it certainly creates a wall in sharing the content.
- Discussion rooms are very active. I'd like to see them update the forum software a bit and make it a bit more interactive, but at any one time you can find hundreds of folks chatting at the same time.
It will be interesting to see what ESPN will introduce in 2008. What about more access to their mobile data? Facebook integration? Their own social networking platform using Open Social?
/kff
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