Last weekend marked the beginning of the baseball season and with it came a surge in popularity of baseball teams’ public profiles on Facebook. In under a week the Boston Red Sox have grown from 1,173 fans to over 46,000 as of the last time I checked. The New York Yankees grew an enormous amount as well, making them the fastest growing. The largest baseball team I could find on Facebook was the Minnesota Twins with just under 72,000 fans.
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Football playoffs are coming up. Are you ready? Whether you are or you aren’t, there are a number of developers that are hoping you’ll turn to Facebook for some fun games and applications to track live scores, stats on players, and even the games themselves. Over the past couple of years, developers have managed to find more ways in which to leverage online communities for their sports-related applications.
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This morning, Citizen Sports Inc. announced that they have acquired Sportacular, Sport Interactiva, and FantasyBook. This is the third acquisition that we’ve reported on in the past week and a half. I’d expect this trend to continue as smaller startups become more strapped for cash. FantasyBook is the development company behind 08 Fantasy Football and a number of other applications.

08 Fantasy Football is probably the company’s most popular application but as the chart below illustrates, the company’s traffic has been decreasing since the Facebook redesign.

Sportacular is the leading sports application on the iPhone and makes for an obvious acquisition target. The final group to be acquired was Sport Interactiva, the developers behind Premier League Fantasy Football and a number of other sports applications on Facebook and Bebo. Boris Silver, one of the founders of Sport Interactiva, was also a guest writer on AllFacebook so congratulations to the team!

Citizen Sports has a similar business model to Watercooler, in that both have launched a network of applications for individual sports team fans. The company has applications for teams in the NFL, NHL, MLB, and a number of international teams for soccer, cricket, formula one, and others. It is debatable as to which model is more effective.

A network of applications benefits in that users searching for their favorite teams on Facebook will find individual applications targeted to them. Conversely, the individual applications that aggregate teams, tend to attract a much higher volume of daily active users.