Features, bug fixes, and more.

• User experience
• Made it so you can click photos directly from the home page
• Made it so you can click a photo to see the next in the series, ad infinitum
• We added in a widget on NFL team pages in partnership with Fanatics that allows you to get the best team merchandise, like, oh, say, a Tebow jersey
• Added in a widget for new users coming from Twitter and Facebook to better explain the interface
• Created a press room with mentions of FanFeedr in the news

• API
• We remedied having multiple representation of the same team for NCAA events
• Fixed the NFL next game query
• Fixed a bug that made events/last results inaccurate
• Deleted an events “geo” call that existed in the documentation, but, unfortunately, not in real life
• Amended calls for home/away teams, which were occasionally getting transposed
• Made it so that the player’s name was linked to his player ID in boxscores

As always, thank you for your support, FanFeedr

Ty Ahmad-Taylor, Founder of Fanfeedr, discusses APIs for big media and small start ups. In the video below, Ty explains the importance for media companies to be a platform , instead of a destination, to attract the largest audience possible.

See Original Mashery Story By Clicking Here.

Philadelphia Eagles’ Other View Widget powered by the FanFeedr Publishers’ Dashboard

We recently launched our widget generator, available now, for sports sites.

Why would I add a FanFeedr content widget to my site?

The Publishers’ Dashboard enables you to produce real-time, constantly-updated widgets based on a team, league or player of your choosing.

• Perhaps you write a blog on the New England Patriots and you want to drive deeper engagement to your site.
• The widget displays the best real-time breaking team news that will keep your readers informed about their favorite franchise.
• Rather than being one of many sources of content about a team or league, the FanFeedr widget allows you to be the best place to get news and information.
• This translates into longer stays with your site (third-party sites create a new tab or window) and more repeat traffic.

Carl Desberg, content manager of  Boston Sports Then And Now, explains the value that FanFeedr API widgets bring to his site:

“Boston Sports Then and Now has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past several months, as content and exposure is at an all time high. We are  looking to keep our readers, as up-to-date as possible and make our site a one-stop-shop for Boston Sports news. Now, not only can you read our insightful blog posts, but you can stay on top of your favorite Boston teams.  With the Bruins and Patriots FanFeedr widgets on our homepage, fans no longer have to go anywhere else for breaking news about their favorite teams.”

Boston Sport Then & Now’s Patriots News Widget powered by the FanFeedr Publishers’ Dashboard

How difficult is it to generate and install?

You don’t have to be a HTML guru to produce these widgets.

• FanFeedr does all the hard work for you.
• The user-friendly instructions will enable you to produce widgets in minutes.
• You can customize the size of the widget and how many news items that will be displayed.
• Press save, cut and paste the generated code into a Word Press blog or website.
• You now have your own team/league newsroom embedded on your site.

Don’t take it from us, listen to what Chris Rott of Fantasy Football Gator had to say:

“FanFeedr has developed a superb image-delivery solution. Thanks to the simplicity of the FanFeedr API, we were able to integrate “play-of-the-day” action images into our Fantasy Football Web site within just a few hours. In addition, the FanFeedr AJAX interface is built on well-known standards that are efficient and easy to implement in either JavaScript or PHP. This flexibility has allowed us to fully automate the administrative aspects of the image-delivery process, helping us to deliver a solid and reliable service to our customers.”

With Fanfeedr API widgets, you too can make your site a hub for sports news.

For more information on the Fanfeedr API widget please CONTACT publisher@fanfeedr.com.

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Partnership Combines Real-Time, Multi-Source Information

Feeds With Sports Coverage For The Serious Fan

New York, NY March 23, 2011 – FanFeedr, the real time personalized sports service that has re-invented the way fans enjoy their favorite teams and players, has announced a partnership with SB Nation, the fastest-growing online sports media company.

Under the new partnership, SB Nation will be using FanFeedr’s Publisher Dashboard^TM to empower its writers to curate and publish real-time content feeds for its audience. The first product from the FanFeedr collaboration will be a series of digital newsletter products that SB Nation will distribute to fans of the National Football League’s 32 teams. Additional digital products from SB Nation using the FanFeedr Publisher Dashboard^TM are planned for Major League Baseball and other major sports leagues.

“We’re thrilled to be working with SB Nation to build customer-centric applications that drive value for their audience,” says FanFeedr CEO and Founder Ty Ahmad-Taylor. “FanFeedr and SB Nation are a great match in terms of technology, timeliness and talent. The real winners will be sports fans everywhere, who will be getting the most topical information for their favorite teams, directly into their inbox. FanFeedr is making SB Nation’s amazing sports coverage even better.”

“FanFeedr is a great addition to SB Nation’s arsenal and a real win for our audience,” says SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff. “FanFeedr’s real-time curation of sports news will empower our world class sports editors and experts to produce best-in-class newsletters, starting with all the NFL teams and then expanding to other sports throughout the year. Our audience expects the best in sports coverage from us, FanFeedr lets us deliver it to them practically as the news happens.”

FanFeedr made the product real in a few months, and this is the first product out of the partnership.

FanFeedr’s Publisher Dashboard^TM allows publishers to view, select and publish real-time feeds of mainstream sports news, blogs, photos, videos, tweets, scores, data, and other information.  The FanFeedr API that powers the Publisher Dashboard^TM, contains content and data from over  8,000 information sources that are matched against more than 55,000 athletes and 4,000 sports teams, including 1,700 colleges and universities, across 15 sports.  It is being used by over 500 developers. FanFeedr has revolutionized the sports experience by taking fandom to an entirely new level of access and involvement, available via any PC, tablet or smart phone.

SB Nation is one of the top 10 sports sites in terms of unique visitors and the fastest growing among them, publishing over 300 communities for passionate fans worldwide. SB Nation is the first major sports publisher to harness the power of FanFeedr’s API for real-time sports news aggregation.

For more information on FanFeedr’s publisher, developer, and consumer products, visit  www.fanfeedr.com.

Improvements

• You can watch all of the March Madness games directly from our NCAA Basketball scoreboards

Mobile hotness

• We relaunched our FanFeedr iPhone and iPad application to get rid of the login loop that was driving some of you crazy
• We also relaunched our Redskins Feedr application for you dedicated Redskins fans
• Made the application more stable
• Added in other bug fixes

Bug fixes

• We fixed a login issue in our Chrome application for Facebook
• Fixed an issue whereby scores were being replicated multiple times via the API
• Fixed the way that photo embeds from FanFeedr into Facebook display (they work now)
• Inline commenting on the home page was fixed
• Fixed “Hotness” on the site that so that it works immediately for new items on the site
• Fixed a bug whereby our Chrome app displaying the same favicon for all sources.

Cool? Cool.

First the really good news: we hit over 160,000 Twitter followers across our accounts last month. Yay for us!

For the following site upgrades, most are technology fixes and upgrades, so you are duly forewarned.

• We paginated our Leaderboard, so the pages loads faster and you can do a deeper dive on your favorite sports
• We are now aggregating all of the player and team tweets from Major League Soccer, as you can see here via our list of MLS Tweets
• Fixed a weird glitch with SIU Edwardsville Cougars’s basketball schedule, because we were besieged with requests and prioritized it
• We added monitoring to all of our server processes to ensure better uptime
• We upgraded SQL Alchemy and Mako to versions 0.6.5 and 0.3.6 respectively
• We are publishing some additional material directly out of Solr
• We upgraded and fixed a number of FanFeedr API calls, which are noted in detail on the developer portal

More good stuff in the pipeline, and thank you, as always for using the service.

Thanks, FanFeedr

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

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!

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

Are you ready for some football? Here at FanFeedr HQ, we certainly are. We’ve even broken out the miniature helmets full of M&Mâ„¢s and Cheez-itâ„¢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.