If there’s one thing that has irrefutably become more entertaining than it was prior to Twitter, it’s sports. I mean, there’s probably a lot of other things, but you used to only be able to annoy your friends in person by discussing your fantasy team or a star player’s lackluster season. Now you can now talk to the entire Internet and respond instantaneously to the bad hand that fate has dealt your team.
That alone is hard to beat. But the iOS 5 announcement of increased Twitter integration should make sports-tweets even more ubiquitous. Imagine reading a story at Yahoo! Sports on fantasy football sleepers and tweeting about it via the in-app Twitter function of Safari. Without jumping back and forth to copy a URL or a line of text, you’d be good to go instantly.
As good as that sounds (and from where I’m sitting on the couch watching a baseball game, it sounds pretty good), this could just be the beginning. With an iPhone that signs you into Twitter automatically some of my favorite sports apps could see a real boost.
Take Sportacular, for instance. Sportacular uses Facebook as a log-in mechanism so you can post about the game you’re monitoring. But with a Twitter account that was always ‘logged-in’ you could theoretically do the same with Sportacular and Twitter and have your comments cross-post to your actual Twitter feed. And all without having to repeatedly type in your Twitter log-in information.
That sort of thing would come in handy if you weren’t actually watching the game and could only monitor the game via score apps. In fact, the same thought would work for another great sports score app, SportsTap, as well. Currently SportsTap doesn’t have any sort of user-commenting model via Facebook or Twitter, but the addition of the iOS 5 Twitter functions could make it that much more competitive with apps like Sportacular. And competition is never a bad thing when it comes to apps.
Users of ESPN Passport, an app that serves as a Foursquare for sporting events, might even find something to like here. While you can comment in the app currently on specific events, the ease of signing-in to the app with Twitter would make it that much more user friendly, and oddly enough, give Twitter a boost by giving it some Foursquare-esque features like check-ins and mapping functions to see whose at the game with you.
Obviously it’s a little premature to judge just how iOS 5 is going to change all the apps we use currently, but I’d say sports fans have a lot to look forward to when it comes to their go-to apps. After all, if Twitter itself made sports more fun than ever to follow, enhanced integration should be a slam dunk.
