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

• We now have individual pages for each of the NASCAR teams, like Penske
• We also have Twitter accounts for Penske and others

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

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

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

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

Release 40 is up and full of holiday cheer

Not really, but we cynically know that holiday headlines get more page-rank juice in December.

The formal proceedings:

• Schedules constrained to one season.
• Basketball box score cleanup (no more leading “S’s”, whatever those were about.)
• Better recap links (specific to team, conference, league)
• Improved soccer names in scoreboard (the German teams were killing us.)
• Conference-specific standings and scoreboard
• Fixed AJAX update for social gestures (removed dupes)
• Added tennis/golf players to our Hot Topics
• We have over 5,200 sources, including Huffington Post sports.
• Fixed recap tweets formatting in Twitter

We hope you are having a good December and we will have more at the end of the week.

Thanks, Feedr of Fans

Version 36 is up with push alerts on the iPhone and more

Right to it . . .

Push notifications on the iPhone

• All iPhone users with version 1.0 of the application will now get scores sent to them when games are in progress, based on their FanFeed.

Better experience for first time users

• New first time user experience (FTUE) that has yellow boxes that shows new users exactly what they have to do to get a personalized FanFeed.
• To see this go to the site . . .

1. Log out if you are already logged in
2. Refresh the page
3. This only works on Safari, Firefox and Chrome
4. It doesn’t work on IE 6, 7, or 8.

Also . . .

• Scoreboards for all of the other games on each boxscore page, like the Lakers beat down of the Suns, last night, for example.
• Twitter feeds, like the one for my beloved Warriors, are powered directly off of our website, for reduced latency and real-time scores

More to come next week, and let us know what you think.

Thanks, the Feedr of the Fans

Latest version of our iPhone app is available.

Get v.0.9.5 here

Version 0.9.5 of the FanFeedr iPhone app is live on the iTunes App Store and available now as a free download.

What’s New

1. Commenting! You can now comment on stories, photos and games.
2. Share to Twitter. You can share your status updates, stories, and comments with both Twitter and Facebook.
3. Improved Photo View, with scrollable caption support.
4. Many tweaks, improvements and bug fixes.

Thank you for your interest in the FanFeedr iPhone and iPod Touch application.

That’s it!

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 26: Smoother operator

Dear fans of FanFeedr,

Another week, another release. We’re happy to announce the arrival of Release 26. This week’s batch of goodies include:

• Interface enhancements. In response to useability surveys, we’ve added a few touches to help streamline your FanFeedr experience. Registered users can now add and remove teams and players from their list of fanned items directly from the home page, and we’ve also made it clearer what teams and players you’ve fanned when you visit their pages. Over the next few weeks we’ll be doing more to make your content feeds easier to manage and the site easier to use.
• Twenty new content sources, including the smartly done Denver Stiffs and Matthew Berry, the Talented Mr. Roto.
• Refinements to the new commenting system we introduced last week.
• And last but certainly not least, we’ve added Twitter feeds for more teams and your favorite colleges, including (but not limited to) Ohio State Buckeyes news, Florida Gator news, Texas A&M Aggies news, and Arizona State Wildcats news. Check your alma mater’s page to see if we’ve added yours yet.

As always, we encourage you to let us know how we’re doing. Hit us up on our Feedback widget to give us your thoughts.

Until next week,
Your friends at FanFeedr

Release 24 for the weekend

Folks,

This week we have added Twitter integration using their super-transparent OAuth implementation. Which means that you can . . .

• Post your status update to Twitter as well as Facebook
• Send stories, videos and blog posts to Twitter

We have added the ability for you to follow your favorite teams ON Twitter, if you would prefer to do so there. So far we have all MLB baseball teams (like the Red Sox), and the top European football teams (like Barça). The NFL and colleges will be added next week, and the NBA and NHL in September.

We have also made some subtle changes to the typeahead box, so when you type any name, like, oh, say . . .

• Michael Vick (player)

We show you whether it is a player, a team, a college, or a news source.

Speaking of news sources, these are some favorites that you may not know about:

• Fantasy Players: Fantasy football news for the fantasy fan
• Wages of Wins: Insanely detailed basketball commentary based on regression analyses, and the level of discussions in the comments is also rarified.
• SLAM magazine: top-shelf hoops coverage

Also on the content side of things, we have added all of the NFL players who are tweeting.

Last but not least, a reminder about our iPhone application, for free, man, and a recent blog post about the company from our friends at Carrot, here.

Have a great weekend, FanFeedr