May
27

R64: Tracking NBA Free-Agents and European Football Transfers

We heard your request, especially from Knicks’ followers: we want to be able to track all of the free-agent/football transfer news on a per-team basis. Problem solved.
We have a new filter on each team and player page that gives you just that: all team changes, all the time. Some examples . . .

NBA free-agent news

Premier League Football transfer news

La Liga Football transfer news

One last new feature: we have added the ability to customize your feed on the team pages so that you can see just the information that is important to you. When you go to a team or player page, you can turn on some, all or none of the Filters in the left column.

Additionally, some bug fixes:

  • Twitter suppression on the home page is permanent. If you select it, it will stick even if you leave and come back.
  • Added a link to “Hot Pick’Em games” in the right column of the home page to all of the Pick’Em games.
  • Improved the frequency and type of stories that we publish to our popular Facebook team pages, like the LA Angels or New York Yankees.

Another great week of work by our talented engineering team.

Thanks, FanFeedr

May
21

R63: Pick’Em and our user experience

This is a pretty straightforward release: Pick’Em has been added to the FanFeedr home page so that you don’t have to search for it.

You can pick games directly on the front of FanFeedr.com so that you don’t have to go to the Pick’Em homepage.

Also, we added a new World Cup news section on Facebook.

Let us know if we can provide you with other features right here.

Thanks, as always, FanFeedr

Mar
19

R54, for even the wackiest brackets

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.
Here’s the total rundown:
  • NCAA Tournament
    • 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.
Until next time,
Your friends at FanFeedr.
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

Mar
05

R52: One year anniversary edition, now with Twitter Authentication

Hello and good morning/afternoon/evening.

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.)

Some examples of team pages on Facebook:

These feeds publish headlines, scores, boxscores, photos and other updates directly on Facebook.

Pick’Em Game

  • We fixed the badging so that there is only one Commissioner, and so that Newbies show up in the right place

Content

UX

And we are up to 7,000 content sources, including all of the material submitted in the past month.

Thanks for your support, and let us know if we are missing anything, here.

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
29

Submitted for your approval: R48

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.

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

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.

Aug
24

Release 25: Doors are open for trash-talking

The highest order trash talker.

The highest order trash talker.

Improved comments

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.

Thanks, FanFeedr