R30: Live scores are…live!

It’s been a pretty good week here at FanFeedr HQ, what with the Giants beating the Cowboys last Sunday, the President in town this week, this nice fall weather and all. Did I mention that the Giants beat the Cowboys last Sunday? Boy, that sure is a big stadium, isn’t it?

Ah, yes. Well, then — to business! New features this week:

• Live scores and boxscores. Now the games and boxscores pages both reflect in-game progress. As a bonus, we’ve split up the games page into NCAA conferences and soccer leagues, so it’s easier to navigate to the games you’re most interested in.
• League scoreboard. On every league page you can now keep track of today’s games as they happen. For the NFL and NCAA football, the games are this week’s games — no use looking at today’s games on, say, Wednesday.
• Widgets. Now you can create widgets out of the content feeds for your favorite teams, players, colleges and leagues and place them on your website or blog. Or your friend’s website or blog, assuming they like the same teams as you do. Or not.
• More content sources for our college fans, including college newspapers, blogs and hometown media. If you don’t see enough news about your favorite college teams, check back — we’re adding more all the time.

We’ve got more updates coming soon, so please check in now and then. And we do ask once again that you keep us honest via the Feedback button on every page.

Talk to you soon,

Your friends at FanFeedr

P.S. Notice how I didn’t even mention how the Yankees were the first team to get into the postseason.

R29: R is for Refinement

As long-time readers and fans of FanFeedr know, our releases can vary based on what we’ve been up to during the week. Some weeks we launch ourselves on the seas of innovation with full steam ahead; other weeks find us down in the engine room, adjusting the valves and levers. This one is one of those.

Minor refinements, then, in anticipation of greater things to come:

• Small improvements to the UI
  • New status update area to distinguish from the search bar
  • Less clutter on user profile pages
  • More recaps and boxscores for NCAA football
  • Better support for IE7
• New features in the coming weeks:
  • Greater control of user preferences for content filtering, site behavior and privacy
  • Streamlined interface for better navigation
  • Live scores and in-game updates
  • And some planned features that we’re keeping under wraps for now.

As always, hit the Feedback button to convey your thoughts, and we thank you for your support. Now to get the grease out of these coveralls.

Until next time,
Your friends at FanFeedr.

FanFeedr Satisfies Football Junkies with A Personalized Real-Time Football News Fix

MEDIA CONTACT

Amy Bonetti
Big Mouth Communications
415-384-0900
amy@bigmouthpr.com

Personalized Facebook Ads Help Fans Stay Connected to Their Favorite Local Teams

NYC — SEPTEMBER 15, 2009 –Football fans have many reasons to rejoice this September — college football season has begun, the first NFL game kicked off on September 10, and now there’s a better, faster way for fans to keep track of all the action: FanFeedr (http://www.fanfeedr.com).

FanFeedr has developed a powerful real-time aggregation engine that combs the web to find rich, high-quality content on virtually any topic related to football. The concept is simple: anyone can go to FanFeedr and choose their favorite teams and players; FanFeedr then searches the web for related content and serves it up in a personalized real time FanFeed — including scores, articles, blog posts, Twitter updates, photos, videos and much more.

“Prior to FanFeedr, football fans had to visit multiple sites to get their daily sports fix,” says FanFeedr founder and CEO Ty Ahmad-Taylor. “They had to go to one site for scores, one for news and opinion, and another to see what other fans were talking about. Now FanFeeder delivers it all in ONE place.”

The site doesn’t even require users to create a new membership profile or choose a password. “No one wants to have to remember yet another username and password,” says Ahmad-Taylor. Fans can access the site with their Facebook login and immediately start creating a custom feed.

FanFeedr already covers all 30 NFL teams and over 718 Division I US colleges and universities, including every BCS football team, and tracks more than 55,000 players. The ability to vote and comment on sports news? FanFeedr has it. A network of fans around the globe? They’ve got that, too. An iPhone app that delivers real-time scores and updates? Yep: With FanFeedr Mobile, FanFeedr has it — with more smartphone apps to come. (Apple iTunes App Store link: http://tiny.cc/5Kguz)

The site also aggregates Twitter feeds for NFL teams and players and all the largest schools, so that fans can follow the feeds via Twitter without the need to visit the site. Fans who like to talk football on Facebook can share their FanFeedr activity with their Facebook friends if they choose to.

“FanFeedr users have total control over their own experience,” says Ahmad-Taylor. “We show them whatever they want to see — and nothing else. If they only want to see content related to the San Diego Chargers, we’ll give them that. If they want to mash up their favorite college teams with two or three NFL teams plus an all-star or two? FanFeedr makes that happen.”

FanFeedr not only delivers personalized, real-time results for fans everywhere, but it has also developed an innovative advertising campaign that detects the hometown network indicated in a Facebook profile and serves up ads for local teams. For instance, people in the Ohio network would see promos for the Ohio State Buckeyes, while people living in Pennsylvania see ads about the Penn State Nittany Lions.

“It’s all part of FanFeedr’s strategy to give fans what they want,” says Ahmad-Taylor. “The web can be overwhelming, but we narrow it down to serve up only the content a fan wants to see.”

About FanFeedr

Based in NYC, FanFeedr is a real-time personalized sports feed that lets fans pick their favorite teams and players, and presents an up-to-date collection of related news, video, Tweets, scores and information. FanFeedr currently indexes over 3,000 sources and matching them against more than 50,000 athletes, 4,000 sports teams, including 1,700 colleges and universities across 15 sports. FanFeeder uses Facebook for login, so that fans never need to sign up for another social network. The seamless Facebook integration also means that fans can talk about sports directly on Facebook, simply by publishing comments via the ‘Comment’ feature on every page. FanFeedr invites users to offer suggestions via the Feedback tab on the left of every page. In addition, Fanfeedr has recently launched FanFeedr Mobile with a new iPhone application here: http://tiny.cc/5Kguz. For more information about the company, go to http://www.fanfeedr.com.

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Release 28: FootballFeedr

Are you ready for some football? Here at FanFeedr HQ, we certainly are. We’ve even broken out the miniature helmets full of M&M™s and Cheez-it™s for the occasion. What’s more, we have our weekly release ready to go as well. What’s in this week’s snack bowl, you ask? Let’s get to it:

• First, in response to our user testing, we’ve added a tighter user interface on content pages, so you can get right to the content without most of the window dressing.
• We’ve also added a navigation widget for teams, so when you’re on your favorite team or league page it’s easier to find news about your teams’ rivals.
• Streamlined Facebook integration. In response to privacy concerns, we’ve minimized the personal info we borrow from Facebook, while still making it easy to share status updates, comments, and content.
• Faster search performance, thanks to some fancy query tuning.
• For our API partners, we’ve refined our classification algorithms to increase the number of content items in specific feeds without sacrificing the increased accuracy we introduced with strictness last week. (Aren’t you glad we told you?)
• Anticipating the fast-approaching NBA season, we’ve created content feeds for your favorite NBA teams on Twitter.
• What release would be complete without new content sources? 250 this week, in fact.
• And, last but not least…integration of FanSnap for buying baseball tickets. If you haven’t heard of FanSnap, you should definitely check it out — not only are many tickets available at discounted prices, you can view available tickets directly an interactive stadium seating chart (among other nifty features). Even though baseball season is almost over, it’s a great chance to see a few games before the postseason, and support for NBA and NHL games will be coming soon.

Here at FanFeedr we strive to remain impartial towards specific teams, at least in our official correspondence, but during football season impartiality is a rule meant to be broken. In that spirit, then, GO GIANTS!

Until next week,

Your friends at FanFeedr.

Release 27: Housekeeping before the US Football onslaught

Housekeeping stuff this week, but let us wade into the details.

1. We optimized the experience for first-time users coming to us from Twitter. They were churning off of the site at a higher rate than other users, in part because they didn’t have great context when they came to an article or video. We have a small welcoming experience for users who come to the site from Twitter, as of today.
2. We also optimized the first-time user experience for people coming to us from Facebook, so that they get the initial welcome screen exposing them to the site’s functionality
3. We created a series of feeds for our API partners so that they can get the full firehose of data, or a subset according to “strict” rules or the much sterner-sounding “severe” set of rules.
4. We changed our feeds that we publish in Twitter to adhere to “Severe” filtering, thereby optimizing our feed results in Twitter (so that users there don’t get content about other teams.)
5. We made sure that football boxscores work. They are functional for the NFL, and the NCAA will be up and running next weekend.
6. We added about 50 news sources, including Dime Magazine, news about the University of Hawaii teams, and more.
7. We also did some UX housekeeping as well. Look for a simpler interface next week, as we take to heart the usability testing we have been doing over the last two weeks.

As always, thanks for your support, and let us know if we have missed anything using the Feedback tab on the left of every page.

Ty