Mar
12

R53: Laying the table for March Tournament Pick’Em

Straight to the goodies.

More real-time goodness

  • 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

Racing improvements

NASCAR

Formula 1

  • We now have individual pages for each of the Formula 1 teams, like Ferrari and BMW Sauber
  • We also have Twitter accounts for Ferrari and Mercedes

Technical stuff

  • Fixed a bug whereby posts to Facebook didn’t work properly

We hope that you enjoy the tournaments this weekend, and look forward to checking out your Picks in a couple of days, FanFeedr

Feb
05

Release 49: Blackberry, Android, Palm and Windows Mobile users get in the action

There are three themes for this week’s release.

Mobile

  • 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
  • We are up to 6,500 content sources for your reading pleasure

As always, thanks for all of your support, and please tell your sports-enthused friends to try out the service, Feedr of the Fans

Jan
22

Release 47 is in the wild

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.

Improvements in search

Other material, warmed directly in the FanFeedr oven:

Have a great weekend, thanks, FanFeedr

Jan
15

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

Dec
18

Version 42: Release Lite

Unlike Coke Zero, this doesn’t do unusual things to your teeth.

To wit:

  • General user experience enhancements
  • Better NHL coverage
  • We revised the “Top Blogs” on the home page to reflect smaller and mid-tier blogs
  • Widgets are now up and running, and you can customize them 20 ways ’til Tuesday.

More next week, and have a great weekend, FanFeedr

Dec
12

Sports, distributed: the FanFeedr API

machines talking to machines Pictures, Images and Photos

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

What would I do with the FanFeedr API?

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!

Dec
07

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

Sep
25

R30: Live scores are…live!

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.

Sep
11

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&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.

Sep
04

Release 27: Housekeeping before the US Football onslaught

Housekeeping stuff this week, but let us wade into the details.

  1. We optimized the experience for first-time users coming to us from Twitter. They were churning off of the site at a higher rate than other users, in part because they didn’t have great context when they came to an article or video. We have a small welcoming experience for users who come to the site from Twitter, as of today.
  2. We also optimized the first-time user experience for people coming to us from Facebook, so that they get the initial welcome screen exposing them to the site’s functionality
  3. We created a series of feeds for our API partners so that they can get the full firehose of data, or a subset according to “strict” rules or the much sterner-sounding “severe” set of rules.
  4. We changed our feeds that we publish in Twitter to adhere to “Severe” filtering, thereby optimizing our feed results in Twitter (so that users there don’t get content about other teams.)
  5. We made sure that football boxscores work. They are functional for the NFL, and the NCAA will be up and running next weekend.
  6. We added about 50 news sources, including Dime Magazine, news about the University of Hawaii teams, and more.
  7. We also did some UX housekeeping as well. Look for a simpler interface next week, as we take to heart the usability testing we have been doing over the last two weeks.

As always, thanks for your support, and let us know if we have missed anything using the Feedback tab on the left of every page.

Ty