widgetBeat…

Major League Baseball missing the widget wave

April 1st, 2008

By Al Merkrebs, April 1, 2008 @ 12:52 p.m. PDT

Ahh … April! Being a sports fan, I like to follow my Cleveland Indians. And no, that’s not an April Fool’s joke.

There was a time, several years ago, that I could launch a cool little widget from Yahoo! named Gamechannel, pick whatever baseball team I wanted and see live play-by-play info. I could even launch and watch multiple teams. Well, those days are sadly over.

There are several widgets today that feed you live score updates, but no play-by-play. There’s a cool baseball widget from Schmaps (Sports Schedule Maps) that lets you see stadiums, schedules, maps, etc. But there are absolutely no widgets today that offer play-by-play.

Yahoo! has morphed their great old Gamechannel widget into a full Gamechannel browser page. Very big. Very uncool.

Major League Baseball offers their Gameday big browser page, but no widgets, except for some phones– at a cost of $5.99 per month, or $19.99 for the season.

Major League Baseball is missing the widget boat, in a huge way. Can you imagine how many brand impressions they could get from good widgets? Can you imagine what a good MLB widget could do on Facebook, Netvibes, and others?

All is I have to say is WAKE UP MLB, and join the widget 21st century!

Entry Filed under: widget in sight