Facebook launches social hub for World Cup

Facebook announced on late Wednesday night a new interactive hub for soccer fans to revel in the social side of watching one of the most popular sports events in the world, the World Cup, kicking off this year in South Africa.

"People's football passion will be shared, liked, commented upon and amplified billions and billions of times over," writes Alex Wu, the one in charge of the Sports on Facebook Page. "In fact, one could say that the 2010 World Cup tournament marks the first time in history that the event will be truly experienced and celebrated through the eyes of friends."

Accessible through the "Goal!" tab on the Sports on Facebook Page, the Goal! Leaderboard lets users the world over Like their favorite teams, broadcast stories to other users via the News Feed, recommend teams to friends, and invite non-Facebook friends to rally behind a team.

Most of these features actually seem pretty useful for soccer fans, though the last appears to be just a clever ploy for Facebook to attract more users. Of course, the strategy must be working; with over 400 million users and rapidly approaching half a billion, Facebook has become the essential social network in much of the world.

Just for fun, Facebook is keeping a running ranking of a team's "Passion Index," the total number of Likes the country's team has received divided by that country's Internet population.

The new application, developed by Involver, is launching with initial support for English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese.