Digg’s Sports category isn’t the most popular section of the social news site and understandably so - nerds aren’t the world’s biggest sports fans. To fill the sports fan’s longing for up-to-the-minute news, as well as a smooth mixture of social networking features, comes Ballhype - and it is awesome.

The sports related news will easily bring the users in, but it’s all of the other features that will keep the user locked on to this page for hours on end. In addition to adding friends you can also join groups, which tend to be focused around specific sports, teams, or even the various conferences.

Another key feature, that is sure to see a lot of use, is the ability for users to pick winners of specific games. By jumping into the Games section you can view a list of games coming soon within each of the popular leagues (NFL, NBA, NCAA Basketball, etc). Once there, a quick click is all that is needed to place your vote as to who will be winning that particular game.

Ballhype has a lot of features for the sports fan, and that may be it’s downfall. The user interface is nice, and appears to present all of these option in an easy to use manner, but it will really come down to the normal user to determine whether they can handle all of this power or not.

If Ballhype can reign in these features and point their users in the right direction consistently, it could be come the sports news/social network to beat.