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 72nd 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.”
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.
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
To all of you who have played: thank you. To all of you who haven’t tried it out: it couldn’t be simpler (see?). We have also learned a lot, and as a result, we are going to make some changes to the badges and the points that you get. The Cliffs’ Notes version:
We changed the amount that you win per game to represent the “real” cost of the outcome (since we aren’t using lines.) That means that you can’t automatically double your points with each bet, but it doesn’t change that a win is a win.
We changed the badging system to make it fairer. There are some single days where NCAA Basketball has over 123 games in a single day. We factored that against the limited number of NFL games, the total number of games in baseball, and so on, so that the badge levels represent your skill level, fairly in each sport.
Net-net: you will see new badges on your profile as of tomorrow, and it will be harder to get the top badges. That having been said, you will find badge achievement more rewarding.
We are also going to introduce a “Top Badge” for each sport, which is the equivalent of being a Mayor in FourSquare. No more fussing about who knows the most about the NFL, you will have a single winner.
Please let us know what else that we can do to make Pick’Em more fun for you, by giving us Pick’Em feedback here.
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.
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.
We tired of sports discussions ending in bar fights with the wielding of the broken glass bottles, so we have a safe way to determine your sports prowess: the FanFeedr Pick’Em game.
Search for a team or a league using the big search bar at the top of every page
Become a fan of a team or a league
Go to your FanFeed (the home page). If your team is in season, you will see offers pop-up before games start. They are shown in green boxes in your FanFeed. They look like this:
What do I get for picking correctly?
If you can pick games accurately, you get badges (that show off how much you know about sports) as well as placement on team pages (like the Yankees, Redsox, Cowboys, Giants, etc.). This solves the previously unsolvable problem: who knows the most about a given sport.
As always, let us know what you think of this feature, here.
What happens if I run out of points?
You can take a survey, take an offer, or just directly buy more points if you run out, by clicking the “Get more” button in the upper right of every page. That will open up a screen like this:
All of the purchases are done over secure connections.
