Themes go into live sports scores, starting with the NBA

Social network Threads will begin showing live sports scores, starting with NBA basketball. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the initiative and wrote that he will be adding more leagues in the near future.

Here’s how it works. During a game, just search for the teams and you will see an up-to-date score. If the game ends, the search will show the final result. You can also find out when a game will start by searching for it in advance. This is clearly similar to the way X did things as the platform began showing live sports results in 2017when it it’s called Twitter.

Each score is accompanied by the two team emblems. Tapping on these logos redirects users to a conversation about that team. Threads, along with Instagram, recently decided to stop recommending political content, so emphasizing sports is a decent way to capture the “real-time” vibe of the hip and happening social network.

To that end, Instagram head Adam Mosseri was, sigh, courting NBA diehards for months calling the community of basketball fans in Threads “a great example of something we were hoping to see” in the app. A Threads spokesperson told Engadget that “basketball has become one of the most popular topics” and that “NBA Threads has become one of the most active sports communities on the app.”

This makes sense since NBA discourse is also huge on X. NBA Twitter, as it is still called in sports media, regularly drives coverage and conversation for the professional basketball league. It certainly seems like Meta is hoping to siphon off some of that influence. Apple also recently. The first Sports app for iPhone offers real-time stats for a number of major leagues, including the NBA, and displays live score data on the lock screen during a game.

Themes are all over the place this week. The platform introduced a new algorithm tweak feature that works by swiping left and right on posts and announced a beta test that allows users to share content with Mastodon and other fediverse services. The live scores feature is also in testing phase.

This article contains affiliate links; if you click on such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.