Sports fans are set to steal a piece of prime technological real estate with the advent of Shnarped, a social media platform for sports fans and followers to capture and share sports moments.

A brainchild of three former professional hockey players, Shnarped will very much follow along the same lines as popular social media platform Instagram. However, it will place more emphasis on being able to capture and edit video.

Shnarped has come some way since the idea was originally developed through Hockey Players for Kids which is a charity organisation aimed at connecting professional athletes with their fans.

The version currently usable and able to be downloaded to be used by anyone is Shnarped Hockey which has been considered as a prototype version of Shnarped and currently operates as a social media platform. And it has proved to be a great success after gaining over 10,000 users in the Canadian region and was found to be one of the most convenient methods of communication between fans and pro hockey players.

The platform looks not only to gain a place alongside the likes of Vine which has proved to be hugely successful and popular among sports fans but go one step further in facilitating fans’ interactions between themselves and professional athletes.

Co-founder at CEO at Shnarped Dustin Sproat suggested that the full Shnarped program has taken some time to perfect before going live.

While in many respects we were quite successful in that endeavour (more hockey fans received messages from NHL players on Shnarped than Twitter last year), it has always been a struggle for us to get the right players and fans on board at the same time.

In order to scale our business into something sustainable (and ultimately world-class), we confronted the fact that we would need to revisit the concept. One of the first things we did was reach out to youth that play organized sports to see what things they’d love to see.

The app signals what might be the next big thing in social media with the ability to edit video as well as add on effects for the purpose of sharing sports content with not only friends on social media but professional sports people.