Apr
02

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

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
09

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 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.”

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.

# # #

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
15

Some changes to the Pick’Em game

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.

Thanks as always, 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
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