Facebook needs more friends in its new Sports Stadium - CNET

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

Now Facebook, with its new Sports Stadium, wants our attention, particularly 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, Facebook will need to offer compelling reasons.

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 including joualists such as Sports Illustrated's football guru Peter King) and Stats (easily readable) are all colorful and rich.

But something was missing in the Friends tab: 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, Sunday's game was Sports Stadium's first big event. Facebook will have the next two weeks leading up to Super Bowl 50 to do some tweaking and pehaps add a quick tutorial to help fans find and fill up its Stadium.

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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 on the East Coast dealing with the major snowstorm, had 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.

He likes Stadium's features but 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.

As the three-hour game continued, I occasionally found myself texting with him and even glancing at GroupMe and Twitter.

A Facebook spokesman said Monday the company is working to make Stadium easier to discover and simpler before the Super Bowl. He added that Facebook had gotten positive feedback about the Friends tab.