This last weekend marked the beginning of the college football season at universities across the country. My Cal Bears managed to wallop the visiting Maryland Terrapins by a 52-13 margin, avenging last year's ugly loss at College Park. As I couldn't watch the game, traveling to Southern California, I kept tabs, using my iPhone, by using ESPN's ScoreCenter, a low-frills app from the self-proclaimed "Worldwide Leader in Sports" designed to get me the data I want quickly - with a clear focus on real-time game results, instead the more fluffy features you can find with just about any sports media.


ESPN ScoreCenter on the iPhone: Scores from Any League
ESPN has a long history of experimenting with its Web site - being among the first to embrace Java in the mid-1990s, and streaming video earlier this decade. (See also: ESPN.com Launches New Beta Site, Reduces Ads, Integrates Video from December 2008) It has similarly moved its tech leadership to the mobile Web, with a dedicated site for old-school cell phones and the iPhone, including fun games, like ESPN Cameraman, and ScoreCenter - a cute play on its famous franchise, SportsCenter.

ScoreCenter, like the ESPN Web site, separates out the day's scores by sport. MLB is separate from the NBA, which is separate from College Football, the NFL and so on. But what displays on your iPhone is up to your own preferences. You pick the sports you want updates from, and you pick your favorite teams. You can even select which sports appear first when you open the application, and you never have to see updates from sports you don't care about. These selections are helpfully titled "mySports" and "myTeams", as part of the company's My ESPN push.


Drilling Down on Top Teams' Games on ScoreCenter
Sports already plays a big role on my iPhone. There are dedicated applications out there for MLB, NFL scores or College Football scores, each of which I've previously covered. And yes, you can get updates on sports news from many media apps. But ESPN's ScoreCenter gives me a customized cut of all the information, providing me the top level answer I need in terms of current scores from all my leagues, and with a few clicks, I can see the boxscores or even live gameday action. And for those of us raised on the ESPN franchise through TV, you should be happy to see they even have the familiar "Bottom Line" bringing headlines from around the sports world.


ScoreCenter, Customized For Me, Also Goes Deep Into Data
The app is a welcome alternative to other non-custom apps that give me way too much information about things I don't care about. With college football kicking off last weekend, I know I'll be checking in to ESPN's ScoreCenter to see what every team in the Pac-10 conference is doing, or browsing the Top 25, and getting updates on every game as they roll from East to West. The application, supported by ads, which display alongside the scores, is free. Find it here.

This evening, while reading early feedback on the brand new baseball season over on ESPN.com, I saw yet another ad for a singles dating service, promising me access to available ladies waiting to hear from me. My first thought wasn't to turn on Private Browsing in Safari and do some clicking around, but instead, a desire that ESPN and its ad partners would just leverage my Facebook profile, know I'm married (and not looking), and stop showing me ads that made no sense. It would help my experience, and dramatically help their click through rates and success.

Given advertising seems to be a necessary evil to make the Web go round, there really needs to be a concerted effort for companies to take the wealth of social information that is embedded in all these networks, and get the targeting ever better and closer to being truly personalized. The opportunity seems too great to pass up, and all the ingredients are there - even if the occasional privacy proponent claims concern.

Facebook and other networks like it, including LinkedIn, FriendFeed and Google, are amassing piles of information about me. They know what I like. They know my family situation and my career path. They know where I graduated from high school and college. They know what music I listen to, what sports I watch, and my favorite teams. They know where I used to work and who I still keep in contact with. But as previously discussed, even Facebook's guesses as to what ads are relevant to me are pure failure - which I only somewhat jokingly said we should help combat by marking them all as "offensive".

Forget about wondering how much money Facebook is going to make through selling ads on its own site, or selling credits and game points. I think the real money is in Facebook offering to team up with all the major advertisers on the Web (Google/Doubleclick included) and letting said advertisers tap into our personal profiles, giving them a cut of the downstream revenue. Facebook has proven they know us, even as their ad team does not. Turn over the right data to ad people who do know what they're doing, and maybe I'll stop being annoyed by ads that have nothing to do with me.

ESPN.com's New Beta Site Is Tighter, Has More Features
For more than a decade, ESPN has been on the cutting edge in terms of experimenting with Web site layouts, integration of JavaScript, Flash, and video. While not every iteration to the valuable Web property has been met with excitement from its fans, the worldwide sports leader is looking to again make change, in an effort to declutter its front page, while continuing to add more features, and in an interesting move that speaks volumes, they have done away with banner ads on the home page - likely ceding that the run of site ads were not driving the revenue needed in exchange for damaging the site's look and feel.


The Current Site is Mostly Text and Links
The new beta site, made available to the site's paid "Insider" members starting earlier this week, is said to contain a "larger video player, advanced score boards, improved search and better navigation".


The Current ESPN.com Toolbar

The New Beta ESPN.com Toolbar
Many of the online sports junkies I congregate with via Sports Blogs Nation and Ballhype have two major complaints with the current ESPN.com Web site. First, there are too many ads, in just about every nook and cranny, and second, the site's embedded video player automatically starts playing, making the first move to turn it off, even before reading the day's news and articles. If the new beta site is to be believed, both of those issues are addressed.


The New Beta ESPN.com Shows The Day's Scores
The new beta site separates the online articles from the videos through the use of tabs, showing "Top Stories" and "Top Videos". This both tucks away the video, but also offers, as promised, a larger viewing experience, if that's what you're looking for. And, thankfully, instead of wasting valuable screen space in the top center of the page with an unrelated banner ad, the network has delivered with a full scoreboard of the day's events, much like their scrolling ticker seen on all television broadcasts on their family of sports networks.

The new redesign also reduces the total number of top sections, which had become burdensome in the current version of the site. What had once been a single toolbar with eighteen different menu items, each with their own dropdowns, has been replaced with seven top level items, and a subhead menu for the major sports.

While ESPN has been considered a leader in terms of embracing the Web and making it a major part of their editorial, alongside their magazine and multiple channels, not all their Web ventures have been pretty. Part of the Disney/ABC family, ESPN was part of the ill-fated Go.com experiment during Web 1.0, and has also previously integrated as a big partner MSN. The various domains have strayed from the basic ESPN.com to ESPN.Go.Com, and long ago, ESPN.Sportszone.com, which now redirects to the main Go.com page. But the latest move doesn't smack of such blatant commercialism. While ESPN.com clearly knows how to make money, they've killed the center banner ad, and tightened up the content, which should make its most loyal customers, the Insider team, happy. Should they deliver enough positive feedback, the new beta should make its way to the standard site soon.