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:

• Soccer-Arsenal
• College Basketball-Kentucky Wildcats
• NFL-New Orleans Saints
• MLB-Yankees and Red Sox
• NBA-Lakers

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

• We added the mildly unintentionally funny Ozzie Guillen’s twitter feed for your consumption
• You can also get Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy
• And Deadspin, so that you don’t have to go hunting for your favorite sports writers
• Baseball schedules for 2010 are up on the team pages for MLB

UX

• 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
• Roster pages have been cleaned up to look like our super fresh schedule pages

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

R51: The little things come together

• More content: Over 6,700 sources
• Better team info: we re-organized rosters, schedules and added logos to all of the teams
• Reorganization in advance of March Madness: logos, moved all of the teams into their proper conferences

That’s it, more racing stuff coming this week.

Thanks for supporting us, FanFeedr

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

Release 43 is up

And next week we will have the super-fresh thing that we think you will find quite enjoyable.

The short list for this week:

• We are providing better info in the search box (team names for players, columnists listed as such; go ahead, try it.)
• Soccer scoreboard improved
• We added in the complete list of authorized Twitter accounts from your favorites athletes, coaches, retired players, broadcasters and writers. Some of our favorites include Ted Leonsis (owns the Capitals), Alan Hahn (of Newsday), and Greg Aiello (of the NFL)

Have a great holiday, and thanks, FanFeedr

Sports, distributed: the FanFeedr API

We relaunched our API tonight, and it has several sizes that should fit your sporting needs.

What would I do with the FanFeedr API?

• You could build a temple to the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox
• You could create a daily sports email newsletter that has personalized headlines
• You could supplement your smart NFL coverage with all of the relevant headlines for a team or player
• You could build a mobile sports application

Essentially, you can build a robust sports application with headlines, info and tweets from the best sources in sports.

What sports can I access using the API?

• NFL
• MLB
• NBA
• NHL
• Soccer (or Football, if you prefer)
• NCAA football
• NCAA basketball
• NCAA women’s basketball
• Tennis
• Golf

We have four tiers . . .

Free

• 100 queries/hour for any sport, league, athlete, team or college
• URLs are FanFeedr URLs
• Free

Free Daily

• 1,500/day for any sport, league, athlete, team or college
• URLs are FanFeedr URLs
• Free

Gold

• 250 QPH
• URLs are from the underlying provider
• Email support for help desk issues
• Increased caching abilities.
• $250/month

Enterprise

• 2,500 QPH
• URLs are from the underlying provider
• Phone and email support for help desk issues
• Increased caching abilities.
• $1,200/month

API users can ingest JSON or XML, whichever is easiest, and we are adding new responses as they are requested. Additionally, we offer round-the-clock support on the paid services, as well as a professional services engineer who can assist you and your team with implementation.

We are adding a fifth tier, where we pay you to use the API, in January. Let us know if you would like to be notified when that becomes available. If you are site that gets between 50,000 to 1MM uniques a month, and you would like to make small to major incremental scratch, ping us at info at fanfeedr dot com.

Where can I learn more?

• The API is here.
• The documentation is here.
• The IRC channel is here.

Let us know what you think and/or need.

FanFeedr!

Release 41: Blog Spectacular

We had a smallish release this week in advance of some awesome goodness next week.

Specifically, we launched a new feature on the home page that allows you to see the top publishing blogs over the last 24hrs. Heading up the most recent list are the Sports Blogs from Yahoo, and a surprise presence on the leaderboard is the Arrowhead Pride site (all about the KC Chiefs, natch) from SB Nation. Please check out the list, when you visit, to find new sources of smart content.

We also added a bunch of new NBA content sources, so you can get your jazz-on-the-hardwood fill without having withdrawal symptoms in the lean hours of the AM.

As always, thanks, FanFeedr

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&M™s and Cheez-it™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.

Release 22 with the good stuff is up

Hello there, sports consumer.

This week we have a chunk of good stuff for you.

API

• We have 10 developers using our API, and we are looking forward to their output (which we will share)
  

User experience

• We added top-level navigation to all of the major sports that we cover in the upper right-hand of the large search box on every page

• We made it easier to see the login area
• We added visual cues for the RSS feeds to make your RSS feed acquisition easier

Content
We have coaches of all of the major US sports in the kitty. Examples:

• Bill Belichick
• Joe Torres
• Joe Girardi
• Eric Mangini (for Jets sufferers and Cleveland homers)

Other content:

• Fantastic F1 sources from our friends at the San Francisco Formula 1 Group.
• All of the Formula 1 teams
• Better golf and tennis sources
• Boxing

Tech
Our new categorizer is going to make it easier to add new sports, so you will see:

• Cricket
• Rugby
• Lacrosse
• Cycling
• Swimming

Release 20 is live

Horn of plenty

The horn of plenty for this week:

• Our content and search RESTful API is available. Get aggregated sports on your site in a few easy steps.
• We have a store, where you can get all of your FanFeedr gear
• Better hotness. We’re constantly refining this formula to represent what users find most compelling. This latest version improves how views, comments and ratings are represented within the formula.
• UX improvements for fan/follower pages and fan icons.
• New content sources have been added, with highlights including better Tennis and F-1 coverage

As always, thanks, FanFeedr

Release 12 is live!

We just released Release 12 to the world. Goodies this week:

• College sports are now focused exclusively on Division I. Sadly, this means there will be no more stories about the Haverford Flustered Pedants.
• Conferences and soccer leagues. Now you can view content about the English Premier League, UEFA, the Pac 10 and the ACC on their own aggregation pages.
• Significant under-the-hood improvements, clearing the way for us to add features in the weeks to come. Plus now the engine’s even louder when we rev it.

We’ve also added some interface touches here and there, based on your cards and letters. Accordingly, please keep them coming via the Feedback tab on the left side of every page.

Thanks,

Your friends at FanFeedr.