Spitter.com, an online service from veterans of such Seattle-based sports websites Rivals.com and Scout.com, lets fans follow news and swap messages about their favorite teams — without subjecting their traditional online networks to their views on the latest blowout victory.

The site’s name is a combination of “sports” and “Twitter." Spitter works in conjunction with Twitter, displaying sports-related messages from the larger service, but uses its own online interface and lets people follow and communicate with other people who have similar sports interests.

Peter Gruman

The site’s founding team includes Peter Gruman and David Eckoff, both of whom worked before at companies including RealNetworks and Rivals.com. Spitter was designed for an era when the immediacy of information is critical, Gruman said.

“With Scout and Rivals, we were very proud of the dwell time, the amount of time that a person spent on the site,” Gruman said. “That was a criteria that was relevant in that particular era. This is simply the opposite. It’s a utility function for people to learn what’s going on.”

David Eckoff

The same concept of “real-time social news” could also be used for nonsports topics, and in that way, Spitter could be licensed out as a template for other sites, Gruman said.

Spitter is free to use. After signing up, users pick specific teams to follow. On their “My Spitter” home pages, they see messages about those teams, along with headlines pointing to news stories about them from around the web. They can post messages to their Spitter followers, and see what people say in response.

The free service is currently being offered as a beta test, and early users may encounter some error messages as they navigate the Spitter site. Features planned for the future include the ability to also post to Twitter from the Spitter interface, if a user chooses to do that, Gruman said.

Spitter is headquartered in Bellingham, where Gruman is based. Eckoff is based in Atlanta, and other members of the team are in New York, Kansas City and other cities. The company is self-funded, Gruman said, without disclosing numbers.

The public beta of Spitter launched this fall. Without any aggressive marketing, the current user base is fewer than 10,000 people. Spitter is exploring a variety of potential business models, including the possibility of charging for a future mobile application, but hasn’t settled on anything specific.

The founders are involved in other ventures as well, and the fact that they haven’t taken venture funding means they don’t have a deadline for generating revenue, Gruman said.

They bought the Spitter.com domain name from a dentist who had thought it might have uses in his profession.