New toys for the end of summer | Sprint 4 (old R70)

A bunch of fixes and improvements . . .

iPad/iPhone users

• We released our brand new official Redskins Feedr iPad application, with all of the best Redskins news and information, served up directly to your iPad. You can get the official Redskins Feedr application here.
• If you have experienced authentication problems with FanFeedr since upgrading to version 1.6.3, we traced the error down to a server side API error on our end and it has been promptly fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Facebook Pick’Em game

• First, do you know that we have a killer Facebook Pick’Em game? You can predict the outcome of English Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A games, directly on Facebook, with your friends.
• We are using Facebook Credits directly, and you don’t have to go hunting for currency to play the game
• We added live scores to the game, so you can check your scores as the games take place

First-time user experience

• We deleted the welcome pop-up screen, because many of you complained about it. She’sa gone.

There were other bug fixes. We hope that you are enjoying your Summer, and remember, if you like the website, you can also get FanFeedr for your iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Thanks, FanFeedr

European Football Pick’Em directly on Facebook

Folks,

We have been working on this for most of the summer, so we are quite excited about the opportunity around being able to play Pick’Em directly on Facebook. We are launching with European soccer, so that you can predict the outcomes of games against your friends or everyone on Facebook, all for the opportunity to be the commissioner for the Premiership, La Liga, Serie A or the Bundesliga.

We simplified the interface, and we use Facebook Credits directly to make it easier for you to continue playing the game if your luck leaves you for a short bit.

We hope you enjoy playing and look forward to your feedback about the game, as we will roll out improvements every week.

Please share it with your friends as well.

Remember, you can pick your favorite Premiership, La Liga, Bundesliga, and Serie A teams right here, and you can compete against your friends on Facebook.

Thanks, FanFeedr

FanFeedr needs interns!

FanFeedr Internship: Fall 2010

About us

We are a real-time personalized sports feed. Pick your favorite teams and players, and we will give you the most-up-to-date collection of news, video, tweets, scores and information about them. We are indexing over 8,000 sources and matching them against more than 50,000 athletes, 4,000 sports teams, including 1,700 colleges and universities across 15 sports.  We are looking for people who are passionate about sports and social media.

We have distribution channels on the web (FanFeedr.com, Facebook, Twitter) as well as mobile (iPhone, iPad, Android).  FanFeedr was also recently selected as a finalist for the PepsiCo10.

Responsibilities

• Maintain our content sources.
• Communicate with over 200,000 users directly on Twitter and Facebook.
• Write about the top stories of the day and sports trends on our blog.
• Help with marketing and other traffic acquisition strategies.

Desired Requirements

• Experience using Microsoft Excel & Word.
• Dynamic writing ability.
• Existing knowledge of social networks (Facebook and Twitter).
• Passion for sports.

Please send a resume and your LinkedIn profile to jobs @ fanfeedr.com.

Thanks, FanFeedr

Why users are more engaged on our iPad application compared to our web site

The numbers are pretty startling: our website visitors come for 1m 34s, and our iPad users come for just over 14m 20s each time they come to FanFeedr. I was recently asked why this was the case, and the usual answers came out:

1. We offer a personalized service, so viewing it on a personal device should increase the time spent per session
2. Using Facebook and Twitter, which we require for login, is easier on an iPad than on a work computer (our peak usage is around 3p ET (GMT -5).) Some workplaces restrict access to the social networks
3. The iPad application is an easier way to consume information than our web application

That explains part of the 10-fold increase in time per session, but it doesn’t seem like enough.

Perhaps it was timing?

1. We launched the FanFeedr iPad application on April 3rd, the day that the device launched.
2. We were a featured application for the first week in the iTunes app store
3. The 2010 World Cup began two months later, right after the 3G version of the device debuted in the United States.

That still doesn’t seem to full account for the difference.

The single answer that makes the most sense is that the iPad interface can’t multitask, and that single-threaded application behavior forces users to focus solely on our application.

Which sort of underscores that multitasking doesn’t make you smarter, and greatly impedes time spent on web sites, to boot.

Better insights and Football/Soccer

Recap of the features in this week’s release:

• We have access to a bigger slice of Twitter, so the “Hot Topics’ module on the home page is now even more accurate (though Liverpool fans still talk about their team quite a bit)
• We have decided to suppress tweets in our mobile applications after you folks asked us to do so
• Minor bug fixes

As always, thanks, FanFeedr

Not too hot, not too cold

It’s clear from our traffic that users like pictures, so this release we’ve added slide shows. Whenever you filter content by photos, you now have the option to scroll through the collection images using arrows.

We’ve also updated our algorithm for publishing into Facebook and Twitter. We now publish the hottest content for a given team. And we do it a little less often. So instead of some teams getting too much content and some teams not getting any content at all, all teams should get a nice steady flow of content.

Finally, as with every release we’ve fixed a ton of little bugs and made minor tweaks throughout the site.

Make a beautiful noise

Just in time for the final matches of the World Cup, we’ve seriously upgraded our soccer, I mean our football offering. We now have full rosters and schedules with box scores and recaps. This is true for all of football, so click around and enjoy.

We have also added Getty images to our Developer API. Getty provides high-quality images, and we provide an easy interface to customize the images you receive. You can refine what you receive by team, player, or any other search criteria already supported on the site.

Finally, we are now using Facebook Single Sign-On, rather than Facebook Connect to authenticate you on our site. This should make for a much smoother and seamless experience.

Faster, stronger

The World Cup has been a blessing and a curse. We’re getting a ton of traffic, but that has forced us to deal with some stability issues. Accordingly, our latest release had an important optimization. Box scores are now being written out directly to HTML, skipping an intermediate translation step. This will speed up our site as well as protect us from future switches between data providers. We also further partitioned our application to make it more scalable. This allowed us to add new hardware to better handle the load.

As we’ve already mentioned before on the blog and in this post, the World Cup is a Real Big Deal right now. To make for an even better FanFeedr experience, we added a slew of new hash tags to our Twitter queries to ensure you are getting relevant, real-time content. We also added new World Cup Challenge game. Check it out here.

Less visibly, we laid the foundation to cut over to the new authentication schemes Facebook and Twitter are rolling out. And as usual, a ton of bugs were fixed.

Real-time curation vs editorial judgment, or, the redundancy of humans

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch famously suggested that if one were to build a news organization from scratch, one path would be to hire away the top 50 writers at the New York Times without all of the attendant cost (pensions, printing plants, editors, etc) and put out lean/mean journalism.

A smart tactic, but one that still would rely on editorial judgment about what news should be presented. Smells like latency to me.

Yet most organizations that focus on news, and its associated verticals (financial news, entertainment news, sports news, and so) pursue a model that relies upon editorial judgment to determine what gets published. This has remained more than unchanged, calcified, perhaps, since 1994. It is the most linear adaptation of an old-school publishing metaphor that one could concoct.

The other technique that news sites can pursue is social media sensing about what people deem important. This doesn’t suggest that humans can be done away with in the story selection process, but determining weight and heft, and what is important, should be driven by what people are paying attention to right now, not editoral-historical perspective about importance.

This can be done by sampling Twitter, Collecta, OneRiot and other real-time engines for the topics, stories and subject matters at hand, and determining the relative weight of story importance based on mentions, velocity of the mentions, the authority of the person and/or the site making the mention, and other algorithmically-driven analysis.

The Huffington Post has managed its way to 24MM monthly uniques using a small group of freelancers, some staff, and better judgment about the zeitgeist by leveraging social trend data to determine subject matter. This is higher order prioritization than human judgment, but still trails real-time by a lengthy period. They also have a right-column that shows their most popular stories, and this serves to drive a great deal of traffic on the site.

Even faster in terms of approaching real time is the approach taken by Jonah Perreti’s smart BuzzFeed. Compete places them at 2.2MM monthly uniques with a network reach just south of 80MM monthly uniques. They know, more than most other sites, when a piece of content is going viral, which is different than news judgement, but my point is that it is complementary, and worth as much (and requires fewer people to inject themselves into the process.

Most news outlets are using humans for editorial judgment. The next level in the just-memed “Pyramid of Publishing” is the HuffPo, a little bit of the Daily Beast, and some elements of BuzzFeed that are news-related. There are others in that next tier, to be clear.

The top of the pyramid is rarified land, with a few enterprising souls and some big companies dabbling in real-time + news categories +/- media assets.

Some examples include Brizzly, Bitly TV, the aforementioned Collecta and SkyGrid (iPad only.) (FanFeedr, does this on a personalized basis, for sports.)

There is going to be ongoing friction between these five categories of news prioritization:

• Editorial: fleshy people making decisions about what is important
• Real-time: streams of relevant news around a topic
• Wisdom of the crowds: leveraging implicit and explicit interactions, sharing, commenting, and views, to determine popularity.
• SEO-driven: Demand Media, Aol and others are pursuing this approach
• Local: This is actually an orthogonal dimension that can frame any of the above items on a geo-located basis.

For organizations that want to carve cost out of the equation and still drive customer value, the prioritization should be Real-Time, with a “What’s Hot” component. For extra credit, provide a local window into the above items.

The new Newsweek, despite its shortcomings (and lack of time-stamp on its articles), is broadly tackling this head-on, which is a good thing, and others who pursue this strategy will find greater dividends on their news-gathering investment.

For another point of view on this subject, Robert Scoble has posted a smart take on the seven needs of real-time curators here.

Our Failed Attempt to Acquire the “FanFeed.er” domain

Excerpted from Venture Beat:

Chasing FanFeedr: Squatter, Eritrea and the missing “e”

I studied Latin for five years in high school. In addition to breeding a fascination with linguistic camera obscuras, it forced me to want to spell words properly – which I can do with varying degrees of success.

So when I started my own company, and found out that FanFeeder.com was taken, I grudgingly went with FanFeedr.com, missing the absent “e” in a way that was disproportionate to its impact . . .

Read the full story here.

Thanks, FanFeedr