This week we enabled the ability to sign up using Twitter as well as Facebook, so if you would like to use those credentials as the primary way you login to the site, no problem. You can also post material to and from Facebook, but you will be known on the service primarily by your Twitter handle.
You can try it out by going to the homepage and logging in with Twitter. If you already have an account with us, you can add your twitter credentials whenever you make a comment and post to twitter or if you share via Twitter.
Facebook
You can follow your favorite teams on Facebook now, and that functionality is exposed on the team pages (in the left column, the blue button.)
We reformatted the team and player pages so that they look good (that is, not like a ransom note) in Internet Explorer 7 and 8, which are super finicky about style sheets
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
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.
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!
It may seem like a minor thing, but you and yours can debate the finer points of brushbacks, yellow cards, the state of NBA refereeing and more, as we have enabled comments on comments and comments on status updates.
Your friend: “Yankees rule.”
You: “Red Sox rule.”
Ad nauseum/infinitum, whichever comes first. The initial comment can go to Facebook, or not, as before.
Also, when you make comments on external articles, you can make see them on the article, as well as the comment count.
Have at it.
Search
We added some search tweaks to make it easier to find stuff if you mistype the name. “Derec Jeter,” for my spelling-challenged users, will auto-correct to the longest-tenured member of the Yankees, and if we can’t autocorrect it, we will make suggestions.
As always, let us know how we are doing using the feedback tab on the left.
Thank you for your interest in the FanFeedr iPhone and iPod Touch application.
What you get
Access to a real-time stream of your favorite team and player information, videos and Tweets
Fast, easy registration using Facebook Connect. If you already use FanFeedr on the web, you will get all of your personalized information automatically.
Real-time scores as games are completed.
Ability to update your status
Ability to share your favorite stories and news via email or via Facebook.
Things to enjoy: