Today’s news that sports apparel giant Under Armour has bought sports community concern MapMyFitness for $150 million is just more proof that the big brands will be driving the bus in the race between sports social networks.
MapMyFitness, one of the more popular activity stat-recording and sharing site businesses, better known through its MapMyRun and MapMyRide services, will now have a deep-pocketed parent to help it compete against players like Nike and its FuelBand, Jawbone and Fitbit, and newcomers like Adidas. Then there are software-only or web-only players like Strava.com who are all angling for a part of the new, popular field of athletic and everyday biometrics.
What will be really interesting is if the biometric information from pro athletes becomes more readily available to fans — the Tour de France does an interesting job recently with showing wattage and other exertion information while cyclists are out on the road. Why not have heart rate or calorie-burning levels for marathoners, or basketball players? Recorded stats so you can compare your workouts to LeBron James? It will be interesting to see where the biometrics and social data sharing ends up, now that the big marketing dollars are taking over.
The social component is certainly there – compare your workouts to the pros. I always found it interesting to see how far guys run in the World Cup – I remember seeing like 7 or 8 miles in a soccer game. Gizmodo has a cool write comparing sport from this past year – http://gizmodo.com/5992583/how-far-do-you-run-in-different-sports