Facebook appears to be testing a new feature that shows users the day’s sports scores for teams they’re interested in. The feature is labeled “Today’s Games” and appears near the top of the page between the section that displays events you’ve been invited to and Trending.
Here, it’s showing me the Cincinnati Reds score because I like the team on Facebook. You can see the same score if you go to the Reds’ Facebook Page (as displayed at the top of this article).
If you click the gear icon on the feature, you can set your preferences, or in other words, select the teams you want to see scores for. It appears to only let you do this for teams you actually like on the social network.
I’m not sure how long the feature has been in testing. I haven’t come across any other articles about it, and I’ve only found a couple of tweets about it. It looks like it’s been going on for about a month based on that.
Anyone else seen the new "Today's Games" on #Facebook? It appears to pull from the pages of teams. Very cool. #SMM pic.twitter.com/7f4VgxtKXV
— Sarah Bonkowski (@SarahBonkowski) June 23, 2015
Whoa, when did Facebook add a "Today's Games" widget? It knows I am a Mets fan, wants to be useful, I guess? pic.twitter.com/2ZJj2YMkQ8
— Alex Weprin (@alexweprin) June 2, 2015
Facebook wants to be a better resource for news. This has been the case for years at this point, and is still evident in another test it’s doing with its search interface, which adds a News option. Well, I’d say sports scores for the teams people follow are pretty important news to users, so this makes it easy for people to keep an eye on that at a glance.