Better insights and Football/Soccer

Recap of the features in this week’s release:

• We have access to a bigger slice of Twitter, so the “Hot Topics’ module on the home page is now even more accurate (though Liverpool fans still talk about their team quite a bit)
• We have decided to suppress tweets in our mobile applications after you folks asked us to do so
• Minor bug fixes

As always, thanks, FanFeedr

Real-time curation vs editorial judgment, or, the redundancy of humans

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch famously suggested that if one were to build a news organization from scratch, one path would be to hire away the top 50 writers at the New York Times without all of the attendant cost (pensions, printing plants, editors, etc) and put out lean/mean journalism.

A smart tactic, but one that still would rely on editorial judgment about what news should be presented. Smells like latency to me.

Yet most organizations that focus on news, and its associated verticals (financial news, entertainment news, sports news, and so) pursue a model that relies upon editorial judgment to determine what gets published. This has remained more than unchanged, calcified, perhaps, since 1994. It is the most linear adaptation of an old-school publishing metaphor that one could concoct.

The other technique that news sites can pursue is social media sensing about what people deem important. This doesn’t suggest that humans can be done away with in the story selection process, but determining weight and heft, and what is important, should be driven by what people are paying attention to right now, not editoral-historical perspective about importance.

This can be done by sampling Twitter, Collecta, OneRiot and other real-time engines for the topics, stories and subject matters at hand, and determining the relative weight of story importance based on mentions, velocity of the mentions, the authority of the person and/or the site making the mention, and other algorithmically-driven analysis.

The Huffington Post has managed its way to 24MM monthly uniques using a small group of freelancers, some staff, and better judgment about the zeitgeist by leveraging social trend data to determine subject matter. This is higher order prioritization than human judgment, but still trails real-time by a lengthy period. They also have a right-column that shows their most popular stories, and this serves to drive a great deal of traffic on the site.

Even faster in terms of approaching real time is the approach taken by Jonah Perreti’s smart BuzzFeed. Compete places them at 2.2MM monthly uniques with a network reach just south of 80MM monthly uniques. They know, more than most other sites, when a piece of content is going viral, which is different than news judgement, but my point is that it is complementary, and worth as much (and requires fewer people to inject themselves into the process.

Most news outlets are using humans for editorial judgment. The next level in the just-memed “Pyramid of Publishing” is the HuffPo, a little bit of the Daily Beast, and some elements of BuzzFeed that are news-related. There are others in that next tier, to be clear.

The top of the pyramid is rarified land, with a few enterprising souls and some big companies dabbling in real-time + news categories +/- media assets.

Some examples include Brizzly, Bitly TV, the aforementioned Collecta and SkyGrid (iPad only.) (FanFeedr, does this on a personalized basis, for sports.)

There is going to be ongoing friction between these five categories of news prioritization:

• Editorial: fleshy people making decisions about what is important
• Real-time: streams of relevant news around a topic
• Wisdom of the crowds: leveraging implicit and explicit interactions, sharing, commenting, and views, to determine popularity.
• SEO-driven: Demand Media, Aol and others are pursuing this approach
• Local: This is actually an orthogonal dimension that can frame any of the above items on a geo-located basis.

For organizations that want to carve cost out of the equation and still drive customer value, the prioritization should be Real-Time, with a “What’s Hot” component. For extra credit, provide a local window into the above items.

The new Newsweek, despite its shortcomings (and lack of time-stamp on its articles), is broadly tackling this head-on, which is a good thing, and others who pursue this strategy will find greater dividends on their news-gathering investment.

For another point of view on this subject, Robert Scoble has posted a smart take on the seven needs of real-time curators here.

R65 Knicks Free-Agents now truly free

This week’s release had some fixes that make possible publishing last week’s free agent-focused news anywhere. Here are some examples from the Knicks.

• View the Knicks Free Agents website
• Follow Knicks Free Agents on Twitter
• Fan Knicks Free Agents on Facebook

As an aggregation and distribution service we make the best choices we can about what information to corral and where to send it. However we aren’t always exactly right for everyone. Accordingly, last week we added a feature that allowed you to suppress Twitter across the site, and this week we made a less visible change and now support OAuth. We will be adding this to our API documentation shortly, but if you can’t wait and want to integrate now, drop us a line.

In release-related news, this will be the last weekly release for now. We are fine-tuning our development model by adding some planning overheard and extending our development cycles to two weeks. We will occasionally do point releases with bug fixes, but going forward major releases will be every two weeks. This will allow us to continue delivering great new incremental features while we lay the foundation for bigger leaps forward.

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

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

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!