The FanFeedr Blog

Goodies this week for the Web site.

• Better hotness on the home page in the upper right (more revisions over next two weeks)
• Tighter binding of the “Why?” stories to the category
• Added a time stamp so that you can see when the hotness was last updated on home page
• Added “Fantasy Sports” as a category on the bottom of every page

And we have other goodness for the iPhone. Get v.0.9.6 here.

Version 0.9.6 of the FanFeedr iPhone app is live on the iTunes App Store and available now as a free download.

What’s New

That’s it!

Thanks, the FanFeedr-people.

One of the central design goals of FanFeedr to help people find sports content that’s not just new but interesting — in short, surfacing whatever stories attract the most attention. So it’s not unusual here at Global HQ to hear us to discuss our internal attention metric (what we call “hotness”) as we tune it to capture the likes and dislikes of FanFeedr Nation. This week our discussions have finally borne fruit:

• We rolled out a new algorithm for hotness, together with a new homepage widget that shows the topics people care most about, and the story that makes each topic so popular
• We’ve added over 4500 new content sources (a new record, thanks to our dedicated interns), so we can now say that we’ve clarified on Cleveland State, banged it out for Boise State, and fired it up for Fresno State. Yeah, I said it.
• Also available this week is an update to the FanFeedr iPhone app (thanks to the steady hand on the wheel of Sangraal Aiken, our iPhone maven), that provides major improvements to performance and display and better behavior in landscape mode
• And we tuned our greeting for first-time users joining us from social networks to be more elegant and refined. Just like us.

It’s a big sports weekend here in the Big Apple, so that’s all for this week. Tune in next time when we discuss R35, next week’s release. And as always we thank you for your support.

Cheers,

Your friends at FanFeedr.

Who turned down the thermostat? Sure, it’s October, but that doesn’t mean it’s late October. Even so, we’ve gotten a hint of the Arctic this week, almost as if to celebrate the opening weekend for the NHL. We’re celebrating too, even if we are shivering a bit:

• Live scores in more places. Now you’ll see live scores from your favorite teams directly in your FanFeed, and the scoreboard widget on team pages will reflect the game in progress.
• Navigate football scores/schedules by week. Football happens on weekends — why have a calendar where half the days have no games? We couldn’t figure it out either, frankly, so we replaced it with a shiny new weekly calendar widget.
• As previously discussed, hockey is here — follow the live scores as they happen, and get content about your favorite hockey teams on Twitter.
• More content from and about more of your favorite college teams — from Texas A&M to San Diego St. to Stanford.
• Performance improvements. We found some extra firewood in the basement and applied it directly to the servers.

Hey Jets fans! You’re 3-0! My sincerest wishes on being able to make it 4-0 against the best offense in the league. And although contractual obligations prohibit me from a forthright discussion of my preference in baseball teams, let me say that I will not be displeased if the team that plies its trade in the northernmost borough of this city tastes victory in the upcoming postseason. And no, I don’t mean Queens.

Until next time,

Your friendly fans at FanFeedr