New toys for the end of summer | Sprint 4 (old R70)

A bunch of fixes and improvements . . .

iPad/iPhone users

• We released our brand new official Redskins Feedr iPad application, with all of the best Redskins news and information, served up directly to your iPad. You can get the official Redskins Feedr application here.
• If you have experienced authentication problems with FanFeedr since upgrading to version 1.6.3, we traced the error down to a server side API error on our end and it has been promptly fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Facebook Pick’Em game

• First, do you know that we have a killer Facebook Pick’Em game? You can predict the outcome of English Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A games, directly on Facebook, with your friends.
• We are using Facebook Credits directly, and you don’t have to go hunting for currency to play the game
• We added live scores to the game, so you can check your scores as the games take place

First-time user experience

• We deleted the welcome pop-up screen, because many of you complained about it. She’sa gone.

There were other bug fixes. We hope that you are enjoying your Summer, and remember, if you like the website, you can also get FanFeedr for your iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Thanks, FanFeedr

European Football Pick’Em directly on Facebook

Folks,

We have been working on this for most of the summer, so we are quite excited about the opportunity around being able to play Pick’Em directly on Facebook. We are launching with European soccer, so that you can predict the outcomes of games against your friends or everyone on Facebook, all for the opportunity to be the commissioner for the Premiership, La Liga, Serie A or the Bundesliga.

We simplified the interface, and we use Facebook Credits directly to make it easier for you to continue playing the game if your luck leaves you for a short bit.

We hope you enjoy playing and look forward to your feedback about the game, as we will roll out improvements every week.

Please share it with your friends as well.

Remember, you can pick your favorite Premiership, La Liga, Bundesliga, and Serie A teams right here, and you can compete against your friends on Facebook.

Thanks, FanFeedr

R66: Getty Images and World Cup Soccer

We have a lot in this week’s release.

World Cup Soccer

• The main World Cup page is here
• Follow all of the teams on FanFeedr, Facebook and Twitter.
• The USA team can be followed via FanFeedr, Facebook and Twitter

We also have a pretty sweet World Cup Challenge game on Facebook. Pick your favorite teams and compete with your friends in the Tournament.

Getty Images

• We have a partnership to Getty Images for their amazing sports photos, which are now live on the site.
• Here is a great example of Pau Gasol
• We are also adding some functionality if you would like to show Getty Images on your site. We will let you know when that is available.

Thanks, as always, FanFeedr

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

• New York Knicks’ free agents
• Miami Heat free agents

Premier League Football transfer news

• Chelsea transfers
• Man U transfers
• Arsenal transfers

La Liga Football transfer news

• Barca transfers
• Real Madrid transfers

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

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

R61 for your picking pleasure

Obsessive readers of this blog will be glad to know that our former West Coast contingent has arrived safe and sound here in sunny Brooklyn. In fact, they’ve hit the ground running, and have prepared these new features for your delectation:

• Pick ’Em opportunities on team pages. Now you can make your game picks directly from your favorite teams’s pages.
• Game publishing settings. Speaking of Pick ’Em, now you can also change what game activity updates we publish to your social networks.
• Improved feed quality. Tuning, tuning, always tuning.
• UX touches:
  • Icons for tweets. For improved visual appeal, we’ve added Twitter avatars to the tweets we list in our content feeds.
  • Team colors. Likewise, we noticed that some of the team colors for scoreboards seemed a little off (no red for the Reds, for example), so we kicked that into shape as well.

Please join us again next week for another episode of What’s In This Week’s FanFeedr Release, starring the usual suspects.

Until then, we remain

Your friends at FanFeedr

R56: We heard your plaintitive cries for de-duplication

and they have been answered. No longer will you get all 54 versions of AP stories on Matt Holliday’s latest bon mot. We have smartly figured out how to stop that scourge of duplication, the wire story, from showing up all over the place.

The highlights from this week’s release:

• Fixed the leaderboard so that we only show in-season sports. You can pick the Final Four teams here, by the way.
• Twitter
  • You can choose whether we publish your game wins to Twitter, and how frequently
  • Your badges will get published to Twitter as well
• The Formula 1 Times is back up, as we have their new RSS feed
• You can find metropolitan areas like Bay Area and Chicago just by typing them in the search bar. This allows you to follow all of the teams in a city in one fell swoop.
• We have re-ordered your badge placement on your profile page so that the most important badges are on the top of your other, somewhat less important badges
• Usual stomping of the bugs

We hope that you are looking forward to the start of baseball this Sunday as much as we are, and don’t forget that the Pick’Em game works pretty nicely for  MLB as well.

Let us not forget: our iPad application is available RIGHT now, for those of you who want the best sports application on the iPad, with the usual personalized FanFeedr goodness.

Thanks, Feedr of the Fans

R54, for even the wackiest brackets

• 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.

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

• We now have individual pages for each of the NASCAR teams, like Penske
• We also have Twitter accounts for Penske and others

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

FanFeedr Pick’Em for March Madness

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MEDIA CONTACT

Amy Bonetti
Big Mouth Communications
415-384-0900
amy@bigmouthpr.com

Throw Away the Traditional Office Pool Bracket—FanFeedr’s March Madness Pick’Em is Here!

The First Sports Social Game Seamlessly Integrated with Facebook and Twitter

NYC — MARCH 9, 2010 – The excitement is building for college basketball fans as March Madness is upon us — many teams are on the bubble as they compete to be included in the field of 65 for the 72^nd NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament. More than any other sporting event, March Madness attracts not only the avid sports fan, but casual sports fans and others who may not be sports fans at all.

And today, FanFeedr personalized sports fix announces March Madness Pick’Em, the first sports social game that is seamlessly integrated with Facebook and Twitter, enabling users to easily share their trash talking and claim bragging rights of their winning team selections and Pick’Em badging status with their friends and co-workers. FanFeedr’s March Madness Pick’Em is a great replacement or complement to the various traditional March Madness bracket office pools.

FanFeedr’s Pick’Em sports social gaming platform builds upon the rapidly growing social gaming economy pioneered by Zynga, Playfish and several others that is predicted to hit $1B in 2010. “FanFeedr’s Pick’Em gaming economy allows sports fans around the world to show their sports-savviness to their friends and all other users,” says FanFeedr’s CEO and founder, Ty Ahmad-Taylor.

FanFeedr users who join in the March Madness Pick’Em gaming action will be challenged to choose the winners of the 63 total games from the opening round of 65 teams through the Final Four and Championship game! And FanFeedr’s real-time sports news feed is also a great tool for users to do their research on each team before making their March Madness picks. March Madness Pick’Em players can go the site or iPhone application to check their updated status and compare it to their friends, co-workers and other users.

The March Madness Pick’Em doesn’t utilize a traditional bracketing system but instead offers users the opportunity to earn badges for each round. There will be five special March Madness badges for the five rounds of tournament games. Users who pick 75% or more of the winning teams in each round earn that round’s special badge, leading to their ability to pick the winner of the national championship game and earn the NCAA Champion badge. “This format creates even more competition to see who can earn more badges throughout the tournament and to see where a player ranks among their friends, as well as other March Madness users,” says Ahmad-Taylor.

In addition to its March Madness game, FanFeedr’s Pick’Em sports social gaming platform offers users the opportunity to compete with their friends for bragging rights and reputation badges in picking the winners of NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, NASCAR, NCAA and other top sports. With the upcoming NBA Playoffs, NHL Stanley Cup and the World Cup, FanFeedr will also offer special games for users to show their picking prowess for these championship series and special sporting events.

Here’s how Pick’Em works: users earn points and badges based upon their success at picking team winners. “The badges that FanFeedr users obtain for their winning picks show up on Facebook and Twitter (if the user wishes) and dovetails nicely with the competitive nature of sports enthusiasts, while allowing our users to show off who knows more,” says Ahmad-Taylor.

FanFeedr Pick’Em plays to the prestige factor and competitive nature of sports fans everywhere. The ultimate goal for FanFeedr users is to earn the coveted Commissioner badge as the top fan of a particular sport. “There is only one Commissioner badge per sport and the fan at the top of the heap is going to be really competitive about keeping that badge. It is much like the ‘Mayor’ badge in FourSquare, and we’ll have real-world opportunities for the Commissioners that provide them access that other fans will envy,” added Ahmad-Taylor.

Pick’Em is a natural extension of FanFeedr’s real-time sports content aggregation platform that provides users with their personalized sports fix. “It’s all part of FanFeedr’s strategy to give fans what they want,” says Ahmad-Taylor. “The web can be overwhelming, but we narrow it down to serve up only the content a fan wants to see in one place. And now users can enjoy their FanFeedr experience even more by having a lot of fun playing Pick’Em.”

ABOUT FANFEEDR

Based in NYC, FanFeedr is the leader in providing fans with their real-time personalized sports feed for their favorite teams and players, and presents an up-to-date collection of related news, video, Tweets, scores and information. FanFeedr currently aggregates and indexes over 7,000 sources of sports content and matches them against more than 55,000 athletes, 4,000 sports teams, including 1,700 colleges and universities, across 15 sports. FanFeedr uses Facebook and Twitter for user authentication and login so that fans never need to sign up for another social network. The seamless Facebook and Twitter integration also means that fans can talk about sports directly on Facebook and Twitter simply by publishing comments via the ‘Comment’ feature on every page. FanFeedr invites users to offer suggestions via the Feedback tab on the left of every page. In addition, Fanfeedr has recently launched FanFeedr Mobile with a new iPhone application that can be found here: http://bit.ly/iphoneappff. For more information about the company, go to http://www.fanfeedr.com/about.

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