Ballhype is a brand new (just out of private beta) RSVC (Read Submit Vote Comment) site focused on sports. It has the standard traits of sites like Digg or Netscape: stories with many votes float on top of the front page (popular stories are categorized as “hype”), but users can also follow the latest story on any category. The categorization of stories on Ballhype is quite in-depth; for example, you can follow stories only in the soccer category, or you can go deeper and follow only stories about the club Arsenal. What’s better, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for any category or subcategory.
Unlike Digg, Ballhype doesn’t get stories only from users’ submissions. They also track news items over 1600 sports-related sites which appear the same as the user submitted stories. This way, Ballhype looks busy with activity right from the start and it never suffers from a lack of content. This puts Ballhype somewhere between Digg and Techmeme with the focus on sports, and they don’t hide this fact, either.
A completely new feature, rarely seen at sites of this type, is the customizable dashboard. It’s a Netvibes-like Ajaxy personal homepage where you can drag and drop various elements around as you please. The concept could use further polishing and options (number of stories shown, for example) but it’s a nice enough addition.
There is a couple of downsides to Ballhype, though. First one is design and lack of images. Any editor of a sports site will tell you that images, and lots of them, are a must. Ballhype must make the overall design more attractive, and pictures would definitely help. As far as content goes, while categorization within certain sports is quite deep, some sports like Tennis or Racing are simply bundled up as other. If you’re going to focus on sports, you might as well focus on all major sports.
Although social content sites like Ballhype are one of the main focuses here at FI, lately we’ve concentrated on covering only the really promising ones. There’s an inflation of new RSVC sites but many of them are just vanilla Pligg installs without any identity. Ballhype does try hard to separate itself from this bunch, and in many ways it succeeds. Any sports fan would do well to check them out.
Go over to TechCrunch and Pronetadvertising for their reviews as well.
Thanks for the write-up. Your feedback on the site design is valid and one that we’re going to be working on, and we’ll be adding more sports like tennis, golf, and others soon.
@Erin: thanks for stopping by, glad to hear that my concerns are high on your priority list.
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