The sports media company Chat Sports, that curates top content from the web to build customized sports pages, has officially launched it’s iOS App. The new app will provide fans a much cleaner view of over 10,000 content sources to consume everyday. Staying true to the web platform, the app provides a personalized experience to follow news about the users favorite teams.
Chat Sports has focused on two new goals with the app: providing a cleaner and more personalized way to consume content via mobile, and to increase the social sharing of content through Chat Sports.
Our new tagline for the mobile version is “sports stories form all your favorite sources personally formatted for mobile.” – CEO Jame Yoder
They have engineered proprietary software, with the help of a third party software company, that helps write rules for every piece of content that comes to Chat Sports. These rules format each article that comes through to standardize the content for a cleaner look. It took a lot of testing but the rules in place make sure that the text and images for each unique source is reformatted for Chat Sports. In fact, their goal was to make the consuming articles on their platform look better than consuming them from other sources like ESPN and Bleacher Report. Chat Sports pulls articles from those sources already, as well as smaller blogs and local newspapers and so in their opinion their platform provides a bigger and cleaner experience for consuming sports content.
“Other mobile platforms seem limited in the scope of what they offer you. We try to provide a better comprehensive mobile experience for consuming sports content.” – CEO James Yoder
Chat Sports has also personalized the way articles are provided for fans. They have engineered a “smart feed” that reacts to behavior patterns on Chat Sports to provide the best articles for each user. For example, if a user has clicked and read specific content about the Bulls from a particular source, the system will notice that and begin sending more articles that are similar to that. “We have personalized your experience on the app more toward what you are interested in,” says Yoder.
The other component is how social activity is influencing content on the platform. If the user has friends from Facebook that are on Chat Sports, the system automatically follows them and begins to provide the user with in-app notifications about articles read by friends. So if a friend reads a specific article, the user can see that and be influenced to read that article as well. Essentially it is sharing content with friends without requiring the user to take any action. There is also a notifications tab so that users can follow along all the activity from their friends.
Yoder sees this new app as the future of the company, giving fans a better way to consume sports content on their mobile device. The already have over 50% of their users consuming content via mobile, and with 3.2 million new users last year alone, this direction makes sense going forward.
Two things that the users will find from using the Chat Sports mobile app is 1) they will find more articles than they ever knew existed about their team on the platform and 2) the content will look much cleaner and standardized than it does on the original source’s app. Chat Sports will eventually release the app on the Android Market as well but for now iPhone users have the upper hand to follow teams like never before with local, national and blogger news all in one place.