Facebook's Sports Stadium steals a page from Apple playbook - CNET

Let the games begin.

Whenever there's a big event, Twitter lights up with commentary, links and photos from people watching in real time. Twitter has at times helped to encourage this by creating quick links people can tap on to find the conversation. Or it'll highlight tweets through its Moments news feature or company-run account, @TwitterSports, which is followed by more than 12 million people. Sports fan are, well, fanatics, and the thinking is that people who care about sports are more likely to want to talk, or tweet, about them.

A good move on Twitter's part, but now Facebook has shown that anything Twitter can do, it can do too. The question is, can Facebook do it better? Or does that even matter?

Let's face it: If we had to declare a winner in the war for social-networking supremacy, it'd be Facebook. More than half the world's online population is using the service. It's already the world's top place to post photos, and plenty of people are sharing political opinions there ahead of the US presidential election. More and more people are also checking in during disasters and terrorist attacks to let friends know they're safe.

As new projects like Inteet-beaming drones get off the ground to bring even more people online, Facebook has pounced on them to make sure most of us communicate with our friends and family using its service. The trick now is to get you and me to use Facebook even more than we already do.

Can sports be the next big thing? Well, Twitter users think so. And now Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, do too. What's unknown is whether sports broadcasters and fans will follow suit.

You may look at all of this and think Facebook is just nicking a competitor's idea. But that's what rivals do -- steal each other's best ideas. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1996 famously repeated a quote he attributed to Picasso, "Good artists copy; great artists steal." Jobs then added, "we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." For years, some software developers would watch Apple events with some trepidation, fearful the computer maker would build their ideas into its software, give it away for free and put them out of business. They weren't being irrational, as You Control: Desktops, Quicksilver and Menuet can attest. (Never heard of them? That's the point.)