You’re reading it here first: The National Hockey League is launching a social network on its site NHL.com, starting with the upcoming 2006/2007 season, the first among leagues (MLB has blogs for users). The service, called NHL Connect, will let users create personal profile pages and “share interests and ideas with other users in the NHL community, displaying comments, photos, podcasts and video casts, links to new articles and content, friends or colleagues and RSS feeds”. An example here.
The service has launched in private Beta and plans to introduce it to the general public prior to the start of the 2006/2007 season. The tech platform for the service was developed by Five Across, a CA-based community software firm.
I would not be surprised if other leagues follow after this, and I bet there will be some more startups trying to coalesce fans around sports, especially niche sports. Yay, more funding…