Want in the game? New Web site puts your there

SILICON VALLEY — Perhaps you noticed a week ago Monday that all anyone was talking about on the micro-messaging service Twitter was the sudden-death golf round in the U.S. Open between Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate. I know I did; I was one of the people actively tweeting (the term for a Twitter message) about it.

For those who don’t care about sports, that had to be pretty annoying. For those that do, it was great, but everyday isn’t like that, only a select few huge events. That’s where InGameNow comes in.

InGameNow is a sports-centric micro-messaging service. Depending on your preferences, you can choose to browse conversation and talk about baseball, football, basketball, hockey, college football or college basketball. Wisely, the service allows you to leave either a general comment or a game update. You can also drill down to specific games to have conversations about.

Individual messages can also be voted on a la Digg and other social voting sites.

The service integrates with IM services and email to send you updates if you so desire. There is no SMS support yet (one feature that helped Twitter grow), but it should be coming shortly, according to Web site Mashable.

It’s not going to kill Twitter, but if Twitter kills itself (by not fixing its problems) or if it can appeal to enough hard-core sports fans, InGameNow should do okay for itself. I expect to see a lot more niche/vertical-based Twitter clones popping up going forward.

The service felt it was the perfect time to launch Thursday with the NBA Draft taking place in a few hours.

InGameNow was created as a spare-time project by a group known as sfEntrepreneurs, a Bay Area entrepreneurs organization of ten partners who are equal investors and operators.