As an aggregation and distribution service we make the best choices we can about what information to corral and where to send it. However we aren’t always exactly right for everyone. Accordingly, last week we added a feature that allowed you to suppress Twitter across the site, and this week we made a less visible change and now support OAuth. We will be adding this to our API documentation shortly, but if you can’t wait and want to integrate now, drop us a line.
In release-related news, this will be the last weekly release for now. We are fine-tuning our development model by adding some planning overheard and extending our development cycles to two weeks. We will occasionally do point releases with bug fixes, but going forward major releases will be every two weeks. This will allow us to continue delivering great new incremental features while we lay the foundation for bigger leaps forward.
I know we all love our annual office bracket pools, but they do suffer from a rather obvious flaw: namely, after the inevitable first-round upsets, a lot of people are effectively shut out of the competition. You know the feeling — you follow the standings, ratings and games all year, only to have your meticulously researched bracket trumped by Maureen from Accounting by 6pm the first day.
Well, the FanFeedr NCAA Tournament Pick ’Em game doesn’t allow such gross miscarriages of justice. All you have to do is pick 3 out of 4 games right for each round of the tournament, and you’ll receive a badge proclaiming your all-around prognosticating excellence. Maureen doesn’t stand a chance. What’s more, you can watch the games online as you check your progress in each round.
New badges. We’ve created special badges for Round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final Four and Championship game winners.
Online video links. We’ve provided integration with CBS March Madness on Demand Internet video on scoreboard and team pages, so it’s even easier to keep track of the action.
Pick ’Em refinements
Game opportunities on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribers of our Facebook news pages and Twitter feeds now receive game opportunities in their feeds, so they won’t miss a chance to bet on their favorite teams.
Picks now appear on all games. Now it’s dead simple to keep track of your Pick ’Em record: just look up the games from last night (or the night before) and witness the fruits of your labor against the game results.
Plus: new Facebook pages for F1 and NASCAR racing teams, RSS feeds for local area teams, and more.
Last but not least:RSS for the home page. You can now get your personalized FanFeed delivered to your feed-reader of choice.
As always, we’re interested in hearing your thoughts, so hit us up on the Feedback button, and we thank you for your support.
We are publishing in real time to Facebook through the API, so no more of that RSS lateness
Facebook team pages also get scores, photos, and videos, so that you don’t have to go elsewhere to get everything about your favorite teams
We are now publishing our RSS feeds via Pubsubhubbub, which means you can get them completely in real-time, with no latency
Scores and photos are have also been included in the RSS feeds on FanFeedr.com.
Pick’Em enhancements
We are now publishing the opportunity to pick your favorite NBA and NHL games directly to our Twitter and Facebook feeds so that you don’t have to come searching to bet.
We reduced the number of times that Pick’Em picks publish to your Facebook feed. You will only see them once a day at the very most so that we don’t overwhelm your posts.
We also reduced the publishing of picks on FanFeedr to just the first pick you make each day so that you can see everyone in the Public Timeline, and, more importantly, so that your own feed isn’t overwhelmed.
On Monday, you can pick the NCAA tournament, and we have special badges for each bracket
We have made it so that our links work on mobile devices. If you want to follow your favorite teams on your Blackberry, Android, Palm or Windows Mobile device, just add follow the team on Twitter.
You can find your teams’ Twitter account by going to the team page, like this one, and clicking on “Follow on Twitter.”
Gaming
New and better badges, you can see them on the Leaderboard.
We added a FanFeedr Pick’Em page that allows you to pick all of the games on a given day. You can access this from any page on the service using the “FanFeedr Pick’Em” link above the search bar.
Adding a user’s winning percentage after their picks on the Leaderboard, so you can see who is a “volume” winner and who is picking accurately
Reduced posting a user’s picks to Facebook and the service so that you don’t get overwhelmed with updates (and neither do your friends.)
Service
Revamped our schedules pages so that you can see upcoming games and refer to past games as well, easily.
Fixed sharing by email so that the links work properly
And robust like single-field Ethiopian dark roast, ground before your eyes.
The big deal this week are widgets, as we have a single page where you can generate widgets for your favorite team or player, or for your favorite city/town/suburb.
Essentially, you can build a robust sports application with headlines, info and tweets from the best sources in sports.
What sports can I access using the API?
NFL
MLB
NBA
NHL
Soccer (or Football, if you prefer)
NCAA football
NCAA basketball
NCAA women’s basketball
Tennis
Golf
We have four tiers . . .
Free
100 queries/hour for any sport, league, athlete, team or college
URLs are FanFeedr URLs
Free
Free Daily
1,500/day for any sport, league, athlete, team or college
URLs are FanFeedr URLs
Free
Gold
250 QPH
URLs are from the underlying provider
Email support for help desk issues
Increased caching abilities.
$250/month
Enterprise
2,500 QPH
URLs are from the underlying provider
Phone and email support for help desk issues
Increased caching abilities.
$1,200/month
API users can ingest JSON or XML, whichever is easiest, and we are adding new responses as they are requested. Additionally, we offer round-the-clock support on the paid services, as well as a professional services engineer who can assist you and your team with implementation.
We are adding a fifth tier, where we pay you to use the API, in January. Let us know if you would like to be notified when that becomes available. If you are site that gets between 50,000 to 1MM uniques a month, and you would like to make small to major incremental scratch, ping us at info at fanfeedr dot com.
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.
