As part of a collaboration with the International Olympics Committee, Facebook has launched an athlete-centric page on its social network.
The new page is understood to be an effort to mark the Olympics experience via social media for the first time and from Facebook’s perspective elbow out other platforms like Twitter.
The page seems to use new software that allows you to dynamically ‘like’ an athlete by just clicking on their image.
As well as profiles of 250 (so far) out of the 10,000 or more athletes taking part this year, the page includes profiles of the different nations taking part.
It also breaks down into the different sports at the London 2012 Olympics, such as shooting, sailing, rowing, table tennis, judo, wrestling, boxing, cycling, gymnastics and more.
The move comes less than a fortnight after Twitter revealed a collaboration with NASCAR and signifies an attempt by social networks to become the social hub of choice for various sporting events.
Last year, Facebook showed live video of various Premiership matches as part of a collaboration with Budweiser.
Telling the athlete’s stories
However, the new Olympics page seems quite bare and digital media elements such as a news feed, video highlights or associated apps are currently missing.
From what we understand Facebook wants to try and tell the story of each athlete and sport in the lead up to and during the Olympics and all of this may come apparent in the coming days and weeks.
All in all, it’s a pretty nice effort by Facebook and has already achieved 1,100 likes (at the time of writing) so we’ll have to wait and see.
