The mid-Winter goodness of release 46

We have completed work on a bunch of material, in order:

• Added ability to make API queries based on location (e.g. give me all of the news and information for San Francisco)
• Twitter accounts for the entire Premier League (even Liverpool)
• We have 6,081 content sources, thanks to our man Greg Schneider

FanPick updates

• We are showing a running tally of wins and losses in FanPicks on your profile page
• Bug fixes to the FanPicks game
• Your FanPick items now publish to Facebook so your friends can join you (you can shut it off by deleting it from your Facebook profile)
• Top fans in the NFL, NBA and other sports are ranked by their ability to predict games using FanPick
• We have a Leaderboard for all of you prognosticators

Next week we will have more gaming improvements.

Have a great weekend, FanFeedr

Sports, distributed: the FanFeedr API

We relaunched our API tonight, and it has several sizes that should fit your sporting needs.

What would I do with the FanFeedr API?

• You could build a temple to the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox
• You could create a daily sports email newsletter that has personalized headlines
• You could supplement your smart NFL coverage with all of the relevant headlines for a team or player
• You could build a mobile sports application

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.

Where can I learn more?

• The API is here.
• The documentation is here.
• The IRC channel is here.

Let us know what you think and/or need.

FanFeedr!

Release 40 is up and full of holiday cheer

Not really, but we cynically know that holiday headlines get more page-rank juice in December.

The formal proceedings:

• Schedules constrained to one season.
• Basketball box score cleanup (no more leading “S’s”, whatever those were about.)
• Better recap links (specific to team, conference, league)
• Improved soccer names in scoreboard (the German teams were killing us.)
• Conference-specific standings and scoreboard
• Fixed AJAX update for social gestures (removed dupes)
• Added tennis/golf players to our Hot Topics
• We have over 5,200 sources, including Huffington Post sports.
• Fixed recap tweets formatting in Twitter

We hope you are having a good December and we will have more at the end of the week.

Thanks, Feedr of Fans

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 22 with the good stuff is up

Hello there, sports consumer.

This week we have a chunk of good stuff for you.

API

• We have 10 developers using our API, and we are looking forward to their output (which we will share)
  

User experience

• We added top-level navigation to all of the major sports that we cover in the upper right-hand of the large search box on every page

• We made it easier to see the login area
• We added visual cues for the RSS feeds to make your RSS feed acquisition easier

Content
We have coaches of all of the major US sports in the kitty. Examples:

• Bill Belichick
• Joe Torres
• Joe Girardi
• Eric Mangini (for Jets sufferers and Cleveland homers)

Other content:

• Fantastic F1 sources from our friends at the San Francisco Formula 1 Group.
• All of the Formula 1 teams
• Better golf and tennis sources
• Boxing

Tech
Our new categorizer is going to make it easier to add new sports, so you will see:

• Cricket
• Rugby
• Lacrosse
• Cycling
• Swimming

Release 20 is live

Horn of plenty

The horn of plenty for this week:

• Our content and search RESTful API is available. Get aggregated sports on your site in a few easy steps.
• We have a store, where you can get all of your FanFeedr gear
• Better hotness. We’re constantly refining this formula to represent what users find most compelling. This latest version improves how views, comments and ratings are represented within the formula.
• UX improvements for fan/follower pages and fan icons.
• New content sources have been added, with highlights including better Tennis and F-1 coverage

As always, thanks, FanFeedr