Ah, the big five-O. It’s an important milestone — frankly, there are too many candles to fit on one cake. For us, it means just about a year’s worth of weekly releases. Of course, our initial releases were internal to the FanFeedr team, but even so, the next release will mark the one-year anniversary of our development efforts.
After a month of heated FanFeedr Pick ’Em competition, we’re rolling out some changes this week that will make gameplay even more competitive:
Revamped game badges
New badge goals for better competition across leagues. Our original rules awarded badges for the same number of wins no matter what the league, which meant that NCAA leaders were well ahead of their counterparts in the professional leagues (since the NCAA has more games, thus more opportunities to win). Our new rules level the playing field (no pun intended), making badge awards more consistent based on the number of games in each league.
A new badge level. Since it will take more competition to get badges in some leagues, we’re adding a Coach badge between Scout and Manager to recognize newer players.
Pick prices also reflect the number of games. We’ve also changed the points required to make picks, so it won’t cost any more points to be competitive in NCAA Basketball than in the NFL.
Better Facebook updates. Pick ’Em posts to your Facebook profile have more information, and arrive more consistently, showing your Facebook friends just how smart you are.
Badges for picking special events. We’ve also introduced new badges for the Super Bowl and NBA All-Star game, with more to come.
Team logos for boxscores and Facebook posts
All professional teams for football, baseball, basketball and hockey, and most (if not all) for soccer.
Major colleges and universities, with more added all the time
As usual, we have more improvements in store across the board, so please stay tuned for news about new game features, improved Twitter integration, additions to our iPhone app, and other goodies.
Consider if you will an ordinary real-time sports information website. Diligent engineers provide a steady hand directing regular updates. Then suddenly a magical, revolutionary device changes the face of personal computing forever. The website has entered — the iPad zone.
Nice, right? And yes, we’ll be working on an app for it just as soon as we can get our grubby mitts on one. But in the meantime…
This week’s release offers refinements to our intensely competitive Pick Em game as well as the usual array of nuanced improvements and fillips.
Improvements to game picks
All picks page. Now there’s a single location to find upcoming games to bet on regardless of league or sport. Clicking here will take you there.
Publish game outcomes to FB. Results of the outcomes of your game picks can now be published to Facebook, providing even more fertile ground for mocking your friends.
And some other enhancements:
Better URLs for game pages
Game results for NCAA Basketball now grouped by conference
Team standings on game boxscore pages
And the usual: new content sources to bring you even more delectable news items, tweets, and other informational kibbles and bits.
We do hope this week’s update provides the incremental delectation you’ve come to expect from us. As always, you can drop us a line using the Feedback button featured on every page, and of course, until next week, be careful out there.
We thank you for your support,
Your friends at FanFeedr.
Twenty-ten, people! Who’d've ever believed it? 2010 sounds conspicuously like the future, but seems conspicuously like the present.
Well, we may not be able to give you flying cars, but R45 is this week’s jetpack:
Refinements to the fabulous FanFeedr game picks and badges:
Posting game picks to Facebook*
A welcoming “newbie” badge for your first successful pick. Don’t you feel special?
Support for ties in soccer (or draws, if you want to be all proper about it).
Badges on your profile page. Now your friends can know how smart you are too.
Top fans ranked by gaming results. You can now officially be the top fan of top fans.
And of course, our usual various and sundry improvements:
Additional content sources and new teams
More Twitter feeds for NASCAR, F1, boxing/MMA
*If you’ve given us permission to post to your Wall, of course.
That’s all for this week, but please join us next week for more exciting FanFeedr features on FanFeedr Feature Friday. And you’ll also get a badge for saying that five times fast.
With Thanksgiving around the corner (at least here in the States) we kept our cooks in the kitchen over the weekend, combining R38 and R39 into a cornucopia. Here are some of the things we’ve prepared before the holiday:
More relevant results for league content. With so many sources for league content, we decided to publish only the most noteworthy content items to make sure you can get the most important league news quickly.
Standings for leagues, conferences and divisions. See where teams are in their conferences and divisions at a glance.
Improved scores feed to the iPhone. We’ve added some special sauce to the way we publish scores to the iPhone push service, to make sure iPhone users get the latest updates without a fuss.
And of course, ever more content sources.
Enjoy your Thanksgiving weekend, and check back with us next week for new features and post-holiday diet tips. And Giants fans, please make sure you’ve fully digested your turkey before the game. As always, thank you for your support.
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.
This week I’d like to announce something we’ve been working on for a while here at FanFeedr Labs. No, I don’t mean our secret campaign to defeat the annoying robot on Fox NFL Sunday (although our plans there are nearly in place). I mean support for Fantasy Football! Here’s how it works:
Associate your Yahoo! teams with your FanFeedr account from the settings page
Track multiple teams in multiple leagues in one step — once you associate your Yahoo account with your FanFeed, all of your teams and activities are available
Activities include transactions (drops and adds), wins and losses
Additionally, after each game day you’ll see how your team is progressing against others in your league
It’s Yahoo! only for now, but we’re looking to extend support to other providers
None of this would have been possible without the hard work and dedication of Doug Tabuchi, our West Coast operative. So when you get that last bit of information in your FanFeed informing you that you’ve been beat down by your bitterest rivals, think of Doug and smile.
This week gives us a relatively slight update in the wake of the iPhone app’s release (and kudos to Sangraal for his excellent work).
Cosmetic fixes in various places, including scoreboards, feed items, et al.
In-game scoring updates for hockey and soccer.
Speed improvements. Someone found a dial that went to 11, so we turned it.
As usual, more content, more Twitter feeds, and more photos.
We’re also in the final stages of a major new feature that we hope to unveil next week. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but suffice it to say that fantasy team owners will be pleased.
Speaking of being pleased, I note with interest that the Giants are playing the Raiders this weekend. I’ll have to work on my smug look for Monday.
Keep those cards and letters coming, and be well until next time.
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.
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.
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.
