Facebook needs more friends for new Sports Stadium initiative - CNET

If that isn't enough, some of the first experiments in virtual reality were live videos of sporting events. Amazon's digital assistant Siri can give you live sports scores. And we've seen how fantasy football-focused (and embattled) websites like DraftKings and FanDuel suffocated us with commercials, even before the first game was played this season.

Now Facebook, with its new Sports Stadium, wants even more of our attention, especially as with the Super Bowl just two weeks away.

But it isn't a lock for Facebook at the start. Twitter, the perennial second-banana at about a fifth Facebook's size, has already become the center of major sporting events. To get fans to switch away, Facebook will need to offer a compelling reason.

Facebook's Stadium features, including Matchup (featuring a quick recap of each play in real-time and related videos), Experts (posts from a select group of joualists, such as Sports Illustrated's football guru Peter King, fans and others) and a pretty clean Stats (easily readable) are all very colorful and rich.

But something was missing in the Friends section -- my friends. Almost no one was posting anything. Meanwhile, Twitter was lighting up with more commentary than I could keep track of.

To be sure, this is one of Sports Stadium's first attempts. Facebook will have the next two weeks leading up to Super Bowl 50 to do some tweaking and maybe add a quick tutorial to help users find and fill up its Stadium. Facebook isn't known for taking half-measures, and I'm sure they'll be in this game for the long haul.

Facebook didn't immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday.

Eventually, I tried to jump start the Stadium conversation on Facebook with a post just after the game began, asking if any of my friends were going to try the new feature while watching the game. Crickets. Perhaps many of them, especially those who live on the East Coast and are dealing with the major snowstorm, have more pressing issues.

So, I encouraged a frateity brother who typically Idea on sporting events via group text or other platforms such as GroupMe and Messenger, to try Stadium too.

He likes the features, but he said it "takes a minute for my posts to show in the Friends stream after submission." He also noticed that posts were updating at irregular intervals.