He’s known as @sportsguy33, the most popular sports journalist on Twitter with 1.3 million followers — even more than @espn itself. So it’s no wonder that ESPN is breaking out Bill Simmons’ page on ESPN.com to its own website.
The yet-to-be-named site is described as “about 70 percent sports, 30 percent pop culture, with less video than other ESPN sites,” and it will employ between 8-12 writers. ESPN hopes to launch it in April or May.
We’ve written about Bill Simmons before when he accidently broke the Randy Moss trade story by sending out the two-word tweet “Moss Vikings,” which was meant to be a private direct message. “Basically my brain farts all over my Blackberry,” he later explained.
Today, Simmons sent out a tweet lamenting the temporary disappearance of the UberTwitter Blackberry app, which was just suspended by Twitter for a terms of service violation: “No more ubertwitter? I hate tweetdeck – what are my other twitter options for blackberry? Crisis! Can’t have another ‘moss Vikings’ moment.”
And that’s why so many people follow him on Twitter. We’ll see if that social energy can translate to the new site later this spring.