The only sports page that avid sports fans need – delivering the best, curated sports content in the business

NEW YORK, Nov. 30, 2011 — The new FanFeedr Sports Network (http://www.FanFeedr.com) offers over 400+ robust, team-specific sites and social media team accounts dedicated to providing the most timely and relevant news, photos, video, and sports data for the top sports.

“FanFeedr’s key differentiator is that it has created 400+ FanFeedr Branded Team Sites directly on Facebook and Twitter in addition to its website. What is key is that busy people can see everything their team is doing without ever leaving Facebook or Twitter to get their curated sports news from thousands of sources. Big sites like ESPN and Yahoo Sports do not offer individual team news with the breadth that FanFeedr offers up. FanFeedr has more team accounts that any other service on the Web,” said Ty Ahmad-Taylor, Founder and CEO of FanFeedr.

FanFeedr is not just another aggregator; content is curated from over 9,000 global sources ranging from newspaper beat reporter articles, blogs and Tweets, the top blogs, official league and team sites, Getty Images and AP photos, authenticated player and coach Tweets and much more.

FanFeedr’s product team listened closely to its user base of avid sports fans to better understand their desires regarding the content they wanted most, and how they wanted to consume it. The result of this effort is the new FanFeedr, which provides sports fan consumers with the most comprehensive lens into what’s happening with their favorite teams.

It is drop dead simple! FanFeedr now makes it easy for users to get the best real-time content for their favorite teams. Fans can either go directly to FanFeedr’s new website and pick their favorite team and immediately get all of the best, real-time, curated news and information — in ONE place. Or they can access their favorite team directly on Facebook and Twitter.

As an example, a Washington Redskins fan that’s logged into Facebook or Twitter and wants the latest news on his or her team can get it in one of three ways:

• Directly on FanFeedr
• Directly on Facebook
• Directly on Twitter

After months of rigorous customer development, the FanFeedr team developed the new FanFeedr Sports Network using lean startup techniques to isolate the core features that any fan of a sports team could possibly want. The design has been hailed as smart and elegant, and easy-to-use by leading user experience people like Mignon Khargie, the award-winning head of design for Salon Internet, as well as the site’s everyday users.

During the customer development process, FanFeedr deployed its unique “social sensing” technology, that not only determines the value of each piece of content, but also the overall value of each content provider, whether it is a national sports site, newspaper, blogger or Twitter account. “Our ‘social sensing’ approach is at the heart of FanFeedr’s curatorial process, which assures our users that they are receiving only the most relevant sports content for their favorite teams,” said Ahmad-Taylor.

Additionally, FanFeedr also uses a proprietary social algorithm to determine the interestingness, or hotness, of each piece of content.

Ahmad-Taylor predicts that a major market trend is happening right now with users consuming their content of interest for their favorite sports teams via social media channels on their mobile devices. Adds Ahmad-Taylor: “FanFeedr provides the best information along a fan’s ‘interest graph,’ as opposed to their ‘social graph,’ and we have been doing it longer and better than anyone else.” It is an untold story because Comscore and Quantcast are unable to track this type of user behavior on Facebook and Twitter. This is done by understanding the social value of each piece of content, as determined through sharing and reading gestures across all of Twitter and Facebook. FanFeedr now derives over 80% of its traffic through the team accounts on Facebook and Twitter and does not get any credit for that traffic from the traditional traffic tracking sources.

“We have learned a great deal from the consumption habits and desires of FanFeedr’s loyal users over the past two years since our initial launch,” said Ahmad-Taylor. “And today, we are launching the next generation of FanFeedr, which I believe will deliver the best user experience possible for sports fans to follow their favorite teams.”

Mr. Ahmad-Taylor has been speaking across the country about the convergence of sports and social media and how they are aligning today.

• November 15, 2:30, Ty spoke at the Sports Media Marketing Summit at the Hudson Theatre in NYC: http://prod.promaxbda.org/smm/summit/schedule.aspx
• Ahmad-Taylor recently spoke at the 9th Annual IMG/Sports Business Journal Marketing Symposium in October. He was joined on the panel with Nick Grudin, Facebook; Omid Ashtari, Twitter; and J. Crowley of foursquare. (http://blog.fanfeedr.com/2011/10/fanfeedr-at-the-sports-business-journal-conference-with-facebook-twitter-and-foursquare/)

ABOUT FANFEEDR: The Best Place to Get Your Team News

FanFeedr is the pioneer in the convergence of sports and social media and is positioned as the leader in real-time sports content. Based in Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY, FanFeedr is a real-time personalized stream service. The company has delivered the best team-specific news and information since it launched in 2008. FanFeedr has new partnerships with the NFL, SB Nation, the Washington Redskins, Philadelphia Eagles and over 1,300 developers that reach more than 34MM uniques a month. For more information about the company, go to http://news.fanfeedr.com/about/.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Amy Bonetti
Big Mouth Public Relations
415-407-9008
amy@bigmouthpr.com

This press release was issued through eReleases(R).  For more information, visit eReleases Press Release Distribution at http://www.ereleases.com.

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Partnership Combines Real-Time, Multi-Source Information

Feeds With Sports Coverage For The Serious Fan

New York, NY March 23, 2011 – FanFeedr, the real time personalized sports service that has re-invented the way fans enjoy their favorite teams and players, has announced a partnership with SB Nation, the fastest-growing online sports media company.

Under the new partnership, SB Nation will be using FanFeedr’s Publisher Dashboard^TM to empower its writers to curate and publish real-time content feeds for its audience. The first product from the FanFeedr collaboration will be a series of digital newsletter products that SB Nation will distribute to fans of the National Football League’s 32 teams. Additional digital products from SB Nation using the FanFeedr Publisher Dashboard^TM are planned for Major League Baseball and other major sports leagues.

“We’re thrilled to be working with SB Nation to build customer-centric applications that drive value for their audience,” says FanFeedr CEO and Founder Ty Ahmad-Taylor. “FanFeedr and SB Nation are a great match in terms of technology, timeliness and talent. The real winners will be sports fans everywhere, who will be getting the most topical information for their favorite teams, directly into their inbox. FanFeedr is making SB Nation’s amazing sports coverage even better.”

“FanFeedr is a great addition to SB Nation’s arsenal and a real win for our audience,” says SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff. “FanFeedr’s real-time curation of sports news will empower our world class sports editors and experts to produce best-in-class newsletters, starting with all the NFL teams and then expanding to other sports throughout the year. Our audience expects the best in sports coverage from us, FanFeedr lets us deliver it to them practically as the news happens.”

FanFeedr made the product real in a few months, and this is the first product out of the partnership.

FanFeedr’s Publisher Dashboard^TM allows publishers to view, select and publish real-time feeds of mainstream sports news, blogs, photos, videos, tweets, scores, data, and other information.  The FanFeedr API that powers the Publisher Dashboard^TM, contains content and data from over  8,000 information sources that are matched against more than 55,000 athletes and 4,000 sports teams, including 1,700 colleges and universities, across 15 sports.  It is being used by over 500 developers. FanFeedr has revolutionized the sports experience by taking fandom to an entirely new level of access and involvement, available via any PC, tablet or smart phone.

SB Nation is one of the top 10 sports sites in terms of unique visitors and the fastest growing among them, publishing over 300 communities for passionate fans worldwide. SB Nation is the first major sports publisher to harness the power of FanFeedr’s API for real-time sports news aggregation.

For more information on FanFeedr’s publisher, developer, and consumer products, visit  www.fanfeedr.com.

Here at FanFeedr, we are growing every day. With that in mind, we have taken a series of steps to make both the site more fluid and flexible as well as making our API calls and responses slimmed down. The API posts from Benn will go into deetail on that last set of improvements, but you should all benefit from greater stability and uptime.

Thanks, as always, FanFeedr

On the front end, first, however.

• Made sure that photos publish to Facebook. They were performing erratically before.
• Major League Soccer team twitter accounts are now appearing on the FanFeedr service
• We had an issue in NCAA Basketball where Div 1 teams playing non-Div 1 teams would generate schedule errors. That is fixed.

We have spent a lot of time working on our backend this last Sprint, including

• Upgrades to our ORM, SQL Alchemy
• Upgrades to our Mako templates
• Publishing scores and the like directly out of Solr

That is it. We hope that you are having a fantastic holiday season.

Happy holidays, and best wishes in the New Year, FanFeedr

Over the last two weeks, we have had a slate of good news:

• FanFeedr was selected as one of the PepsiCo10 top emerging startups
• We launched our FanFeedr Pick’Em game directly on Facebook
• We released our Official Redskins Feedr application in partnership with the Washington Redskins
• Verizon is actively promoting our FanFeedr Android application for personalized sports news and information

Additionally, the developers have worked hard (and over weekends) to improve the user experience on FanFeedr, Facebook and Twitter for you, our users.

Improvements to FanFeedr.com

• The Associated Press accidentally cut off our photo feed, and that has been restored. Top photos on the site in the last hour are here.
• European football and US football scores, schedules and rosters have been updated
• We made it easier to login and sign-up for the site by creating a new first-time user experience
• We added navigation to the sports in the search bar at the top of every page to make it easier to go to scores, photos and the Hot News

On our Facebook Pick’Em application

• We made it easier and clearer to invite friends to the game
• Fixed some bugs when we published the results of scores
• Added in options with our partner, gWallet, to allow you to get points for free

As always, we appreciate your business, and your feedback, and please let us know if you are missing anything important in the FanFeedr Feedback area.

Thanks, FanFeedr

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.

The details are here, the main benefit are bragging rights for the chief prognosticators among you.

Check it out and please let us know what you think.

Happy New Years from the FanFeedr team

We just launched personalized real-time sports aggregation at FanFeedr.com. #sports #search #launch

As always, we would love to hear your feedback, needs, praise and concerns via the red Feedback tab on the left of every page.

Thanks, FF Team

The site launch is tomorrow, and it is the result of the talented team work of Mike, Michael, Sangraal, Doug and Babu.

We will roll out additional features, like, oh, say, friending/following in the near future, along with photos, European Football, NASCAR and Formula One. (And then college sports, for all of you competitive Div. I people.)

If you don’t get an invite code tomorrow, make sure to sign up at Fire-Exit and/or follow us on Twitter.