When we first looked at Hitpost back in January, it was still just a concept — people taking pictures of sporting events and talking about them as they watch them on TV. Shortly thereafter, the iPhone and Android apps hit and it was off to the races. Today it’s time for the 2.0 launch which brings a couple new big features: tweets and news. The “meat and potatoes” as Hitpost founder Aaron Krane puts it.
When you load up Hitpost 2.0, you’ll now see scores, news, and athlete tweets to go along with the main event: photos. The UI of the app has also been completely reworked. Notably, there is now a “My Teams” view to get an overview of all the aforementioned information about the teams you follow. And full Facebook sharing integration has been added.
“In the short time since launch we’ve already had thousands of photos, and more importantly, some distinctly amazing photos that were captured/captioned by users,” Krane notes. But he did recognize the users want more information to consume while using the app. As such, we now get tweets and news.
The tweets come from pro athletes who are active on Twitter, and Krane notes that they have at least one account for every team you can follow. “They are generally quite amusing,” he says. The news comes from all kinds of sources. This means big (ESPN, Yahoo), medium (SB Nation, Bleacher Report), and small (local team blogs). “We analyze each post by topic, so when you load the Giants feed you get a feed of the most current/complete news from all sources,” Krane says.
But while these new additions are the “meat and potatoes”, photos remain the “bread and butter”. ” In sports, as in life, photo sharing is the highest common denominator for moment sharing,” Krane says. With the NBA playoffs about the head into round 2 and Major League Baseball now well underway, it will be a good time to try these new features out.
Find Hitpost in the App Store here. And in the Android Market here. Version 2.0 should be in both stores shortly if it’s not already.
